This course answers, “Which strategy, and why?” The course teaches to first understand the opportunity and competitive dynamics provided by an industry. I learned why certain industries are fundamentally attractive or unattractive to operate in, largely by applying the Six Forces model originated by Porter in case discussions and group projects. To understand what strategies are available within a company, the course delved into examples of corporate-level, business-level, and functional-level decisions, constantly questioning how well the strategy served the company in the industry’s external environment.

The single most important thing I gained from this course is why industry attractiveness is so important. Imagine a market opportunity that’s apparent to incumbent firms, companies in adjacent industries, and start-ups. It’s easy to assume the players could have fair fight for the profits involved, with the winner determined by executing business fundamentals such as hiring, product development, and marketing. Now I understand that industry structures determine which industry’s firms will capture the profits, and only some types of innovations change the attractiveness of an industry.

Another course concept that is critically important in Silicon Valley is that of disruptive innovation. I’m hesitant to admit that I did not completely gasp this concept after many years of working in Silicon Valley, but I was comforted by learning about the disk drive industry, where the leading companies failed to react to wave after wave of disruptive innovation. This class taught Clayton Christensen’s framework, which differentiates between sustaining innovations, which immediately serve an industry’s current customers, with disruptive innovations, which initially serve a low-end market that is unimportant to incumbent firms. When innovative technology matures to serve the high-end market, the only firms that can effectively compete are those that entered the low-end market to develop competency with the innovation.

Introduction

This was the final course of my MBA program at Santa Clara University. This course provides an overview of strategic analysis to students who have completed the MBA program’s other required courses. In Santa Clara’s program, almost all students complete this program shortly before graduating. Some opt to write a Master’s thesis instead.

Instructor profile

Tammy Madsen has approximately 15 years of experience as a business strategy academic, and she currently serves as chair of Santa Clara University’s management department. She has almost encyclopedic knowledge of concepts and developments in organizational strategy. At the time of this writing, Professor Madsen one of three instructors who regularly teach the Capstone course at Santa Clara.

Classroom experience

Every class began with a discussion of recent corporate news, with topics volunteered by students. Most sessions then included a lecture and a case discussion. Each part involved a lot of student participation, yet moved quickly. About six sessions included class participation exercises, lasting only a few minutes each.

The focus of class time was teaching strategic analysis topics using the case method. Each session demanded the constant attention of every student. Students who had read the day’s case had constant opportunities for class participation. Although this course’s most infamous content is the capstone project, project discussion did not use much classroom time.

Coursework, exam, and grades

Approximately one third of grade was determined from the capstone project, another third from class participation, and the remaining portion derived from two smaller group projects.

The capstone paper is a very large analysis and writing assignment, typically totaling more than seventy pages including exhibits. The paper must follow a detailed structure provided by Professor Madsen, which prescribes a structured strategic analysis of a strategic decision announced by a major company. In brief, the analysis is divided into an external evaluation of the industry, an internal analysis of the firm, and specific recommendations.

The capstone project requires a lot of writing and review, but there are obvious ways to effectively divide the work among a team. Project success seems tied to essential team functions such as adhering to a schedule, reviewing each other’s work, having effective meetings, and appropriate use of technology. The course moved at a fast pace, so the capstone project is easier for teams who can get through the early stages of group dynamics quickly.

In other words, my team did well on the capstone project because we had worked effectively together in previous classes.

Class participation activities were simple but difficult. Some points came from participation exercises, which required students to quickly apply a course concept to one of the course readings. These exercises were hard enough that they could not be “faked” by students who skipped previous readings or lectures, and generated a significant variance among the prepared students.

The two small team assignments were structured as fairly typical MBA team case assignments. Each team was required to submit a paper for each case, and give a presentation to the entire class for one of the cases.

Criticisms

My only regret is that I did not learn this material earlier! In a part-time MBA program, most students are actively managing their careers while spending three to six years taking classes. The learning from this course, especially the external analysis portion, is helpful for continual networking and career planning.

Recommendation

Santa Clara MBA students should take this class from Professor Madsen. A student will get the most out of the class by taking it as early as possible and by forming a capstone team before the first class session.

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This article was first written in 2011 by Dylan Salisbury for dylansalisbury.com. All rights reserved. I added this paragraph because spam blog sites pick up copies of my blog posts.

For a list of course reviews and a disclaimer, visit my Course Reviews page.

Movie Listings – fast

Although you can just say “Movies,” this isn’t always the fastest way to find listings for your local theater. One quick way is to say “Fandango” followed by your ZIP code, for example:

"Fandango 95037"

Then touch on the link that says “Movie Theater Showtimes Near 95037.” This should bring up a page on Fandango’s web site with listings for the closest theaters. Sorry, this doesn’t work if you live in Beverly Hills, because 90210 pulls up too many Bing hits about the TV show.

Web sites

Many websites can be accessed by doing a voice search, then clicking on the site where appears in the Bing search results. This works for many popular websites. Examples:

"Facebook"

"BBC News"

"S F Gate dot com"

Note: If your phone thinks that you spoke the name of one of your contacts, try again saying “find” before the website name. For example, say “Find BBC News.” This will make sure the phone does a Bing search.

I took Measuring and Managing Corporate Performance in Winter 2008, during my second of three years in the MBA program. This was a 1-unit elective course taught during a single weekend. Like many of the MBA students at Santa Clara, I took three of these one-unit courses during my program in place of one full 3-unit elective.

Instructor Profile

Professor Leidecker has been a member of Santa Clara’s management faculty since 1968. In recent years he has been known for teaching the ‘capstone’ strategy course that students take as they finish the MBA program, although he does not currently teach that class.

Classroom experience

The course was all about Balanced Scorecard (BSC), the technique for articulating corporate strategy and measuring execution popularized by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton. Readings and class discussion surveyed the history of BSC and some examples of how it has been applied at different companies.

If you can access Harvard Business Review articles through your school or employer account, you can already access the core reading:

1992: Balanced Scorecard: Measures That Drive Performance
1996: Using the Balanced Scorecard as a Strategic Management System
2000: Having Trouble with Your Strategy? Then Map It

During the second day, students played a computer-based simulation game to illustrate BSC concepts. The simulation activity taught about the need to use an understanding of the business operations and to choose dashboard metrics appropriate for the company’s current strategic position.

Coursework, exams, and grades

Half of the grade was based on classroom participation and a brief write-up about the computer simulation. The other half was awarded for a grade on a 7-page individual paper.

Students could choose from a variety of topics related to BSC. A team paper was allowed only if all team members work for the same scorecard-using employer, to write a paper about how the BSC technique is employed at the company.

I chose to fit start-up company management and strategy ideas into the BSC framework: a guide to creating a scorecard for start-ups. I distilled the paper into four posts on my blog as well:

1. Introduction: Types of strategies and related research.
2. Learning and growth perspective: Hiring.
3. Internal business process and customer perspectives: Minimum winning goal.
4. Financial perspective: Align the goals of management and investors.

What I learned

Although I’ve never worked for a company that uses BSC, the real-life examples of articulating a strategy and tracking its execution were very powerful. I was struck by the difficulty of describing an end-to-end operational strategy for a large company in terms that the entire work force can understand. Yet like many other management challenges, it can be tackled with iterations of information gathering, brainstorming, communicating across the company, and gathering feedback.

Criticisms

It’s strange that this course isn’t now simply called Balanced Scorecard – the explanation probably draws on the difficulty of changing an academic catalog. I would have liked to see a comparison of alternate management techniques, especially those common at smaller companies. However, that would probably stretch the scope too far for a 1-unit class, and I was able to use my individual paper to explore management practices at start-ups.

Recommendation

This is a great course for anybody whose employer uses BSC or a similar strategic management technique. Students will gain a thorough academic background on BSC, which they can immediately use to discuss their company’s planning and management activities.

Trailer

This article was first written in 2010 by Dylan Salisbury for dylansalisbury.com. All rights reserved. I added this paragraph because spam blog sites pick up copies of my blog posts.

For a list of course reviews and a disclaimer, visit my Course Reviews page.

I took Competitive Marketing Strategy in Fall 2008, kicking off the second of three years in the MBA program. This is a course required of all MBA students, even those with a background in marketing.

Instructor Profile

Professor Lo had a successful management career for electronics companies in Asia before becoming an Academic. I took this course during Professor Lo’s first quarter at Santa Clara. During the subsequent two years, he has regularly taught this course.

Classroom experience

Class lectures were based on case analysis, with a new case almost every class. Each case explored a particular aspect of competitive strategy.

Professor Lo expected students to prepare each case with a recommended course of action, backed up with a numerical analysis. Although student’s analyses were not collected, it was difficult for any student to fully participate in class discussion without having done this homework. Each class was almost entirely filled with the case discussion, with Professor Lo revealing his own detailed analysis near the end.

Fortunately, two lectures were set aside to review the previously discussed cases and summarize the main points of each analysis. Although I put a lot of work into most of the case analyses, my notes from these summary lectures are among my most valuable of the class.

Coursework, exams, and grades

During the quarter I took this class, 20% of the grade was for class participation, 45% for a group project, and 35% for a final exam. The group project was to prepare a marketing plan for a real product.

What I learned

Although I was already a year into the MBA program, this course introduced me to corporate strategy and case analysis. It was a lot to take in during a single quarter! Mainly, I learned that there are many facets to competitive strategy, and the most important activities are to properly frame the company’s competitive position and to use the appropriate framework to analyze the situation. The cases also taught me that competitive strategy cannot do magic; sometimes a company ends up in a weak position with very little leverage to use with its collaborators.

This course was very complementary to the prerequisite course MKTG 551, which I reviewed in this post. There was very little overlapping material. MKTG 551 was mostly about terminology, concepts, and marketing activities, and MKTG 553 was about strategic and competitive analysis.

Some specific topics covered by the cases include environmental analysis, segment analysis, lifetime customer value, measuring brand equity and choosing between brand equity and scale, distribution channels, and value pricing.

Criticisms

The only criticism I have is that students did not receive much feedback on their performance until the end of the quarter. This could be improved by adding an individual graded case analysis paper, possibly in lieu of the final exam.

Recommendation

Every student should strongly consider taking MKTG 553 fro Professor Lo. The course was well structured in include many topics, and the lecture time was filled with challenging case discussions.

Trailer

This article was first written in 2010 by Dylan Salisbury for dylansalisbury.com. All rights reserved. I added this paragraph because spam blog sites pick up copies of my blog posts.

For a list of course reviews and a disclaimer, visit my Course Reviews page.

A small airline's dispatch office, from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Office.jpg

Working for a large company, I see a lot of job announcements sent to internal mailing lists. These job descriptions always seem to court the employee-and-job-seeker with career advancement opportunity. I frequently see phrases like “high-profile role” and the promise of “visibility” to executive staff. I guess when you’re writing for people already employed in your company, it’s natural to try to promote yourself as somebody highly connected who can offer a better career trajectory to your applicants.

But, what many high performers crave is accountability, responsibility, and the support to meet greater and greater challenges.

That’s why I was impressed to see a job description last week that concluded with, “bottom line: if we aren’t [details omitted], it’s your fault.”

I think that kind of language will increase the quality of the applicant pool. Do you agree?

The HP Garage. Photo © BrokenSphere / Wikimedia Commons. Photo page on Wikimedia Commons. licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

First off, this is a trick question — Thanks to Kevin Holmes for pointing me to the Kauffman Foundation’s study of successful high growth entrepreneurs – the average age is 40!

However, most of the great advice online for entrepreneurs is geared toward young high-tech founders. One of the most widely read forums, Fred Wilson’s AVC blog, had a great discussion recently about how to support female tech entrepreneurs, starting from an assumption that women who are ready for entrepreneurship are older than the prototypical male tech start-up founder. Wilson’s post was in turn inspired by this call to action by Tereza Nemessanyi.

Setting aside the gender aspect of the discussion, many older entrepreneurs cannot just quit their jobs and launch their company based on their own faith, savings, or even sponsorship by a business incubator such as Y combinator. Here are some of the things older entrepreneurs can do:

1. Prepare your finances. Risk tolerance is a weakness vs. a young entrepreneur, but is doesn’t have to be your achilles heel. Even joining a well-funded start-up carries a risk of a salary interruption. Set aside some savings. Talk to your spouse. Quantify the kinds of risks you are willing to take.

2. Deepen your industry knowledge. B2B start-ups need deep understanding of a business pain point and customers’ view of the value proposition. As Y Combinator’s Paul Graham blogged: “The worst ideas we see at Y Combinator are from young founders making things they think other people will want.” Use your age and your experience to your advantage.

3. Network smart. You’re not at Harvard surrounded by the next generation of world leaders, so be deliberate. What kind of partners and mentors will you need if you start a venture in 3 years? Now take those criteria to LinkedIn and find some actual people in your network. Find a way to reach out to them.

4. Educate yourself. Of course, there are a million ways to do this, from self-structured reading to peer organizations to school. If you work for a large company you may have more options and support available. I did an evening MBA program — not very expensive after employer support, and I found a new peer group of 30- and 40- somethings who are also thinking creatively about advancing their careers.

5. Parents, embrace the Kids In Bed part of your workday, 9:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. or whatever part of the night you can use for work. Leave work on time and have a guilt-free dinner with the family, knowing that your creative mind is being refreshed for a second wind at night. If you are relaxing to Jay Leno or Jimmy Fallon every single night, you are letting some of your most productive time slip away.

That’s it for now. I hope my friends and I continue to add to this list.

To use social media for business-to-business marketing, consider:

1. Who are the decision makers for consideration or final purchase of the product?
2. Who are the major influencers in the industry (industry leaders or journalists)?
3. How do the above people use social media?

You could measure your results based on how many people in the decision maker group you engage with, and whether you get influencers to positively mention your product.

For example, if you are selling a high performance web load balancing appliance, you would want web developers to know about it, and you would want Om Malik to write about it. Twitter would be a good way to reach these folks.

If you are selling commercial A/C units, you probably want to reach facilities managers. This group will not be as active with social media as Om Malik’s readers, but LinkedIn and Facebook may give you ways to reach them and measure how many of your audience self-identify as a facilities manager or have a similar job title.

I would appreciate further suggestions, as well as specific ideas for how to identify members of your target group in a non-high-tech market.

The most interesting thing is how it’s taken a new place in between phones and laptops throughout his family.

I think it’s going to be family photos that drive us to a tablet computer. Increasingly we’re taking digital photos but not bothering to print them out or even do a great job of organizing them. That wouldn’t matter if we had an iPad laying around the house — the need for printing and sorting would be replaced with browsing on demand.

In fact, most of the family photo browsing now happens on the family iPhone — It’s restricted to the photos that happen to be stored there, but that hardly matters because it’s a meaningful set of photos that chronicles our family life through the years.

If there are younger people in your household, the Xlyfun team would love to receive their feedback.

Ocean Mist Farms in Castroville hosted a field visit for undergrads and grad students affiliated with Santa Clara University’s Food and Agribusiness Institute on May 8, 2010. We were hosted by Joe Pezzini, Ocean Mist’s COO and a third generation farmer and Tim Driscoll, GM of harvesting company Valley Pride. Ocean mist grows vegetables and sells to retailers and institutional buyers.

We visited fields where bundled spinach and romaine hearts were being harvested and packaged. The students were immediately struck by how many healthy-looking green leaves were left in the soil after harvest. For the spinach, large leaves of about the same size are bundled together by the workers, and smaller leaves fall are left behind. Bagged spinach is harvested using a different process that uses more of the smaller leaves. With romaine, the sweet heart is the product being harvested, and the larger outer leaves are left. These spinach and romaine leaves will be tilled back into the soil.

Lean operations

Harvesting activity varies according to customer orders, which may change the day of the harvest. So, the farm is trying to “pull its inventory” out of the ground “just in time” to meet customer orders, literally. I was expecting to see an example of what operations folks call a “postponement strategy,” in which unfinished products are kept in generic form until the latest possible time, but the only postponement I saw was on the ground, where the produce is growing.

The field operations includes final product packaging. We saw romaine hearts going into a department store’s branded resealable consumer bag. This also simplifies the necessary recordkeeping to track a consumer package to the field and the actual work crew that performed the harvest.

Within hours of harvesting, all produce is cooled to its shipping temperature and placed in the refrigerated wherehouse, where it is ready for pick-up by the customer’s shipping agent.
Most impressive, the entire operation will move to Southern California when the harvest season shifts. This includes many of the people, the harvesting equipment, and these large ice-making units.

Vertical integration

Ocean mist is considered to be a vertically integrated vegetable grower, which extends from planting the seed to delivering to trucks hired by its grocery store customers. But, there are some exceptions to what an industry outsider would see as vertical integration. Ocean Mist does not own all of the land it grows on. Harvesting operations, including hiring farmworkers, is handled by a separate company, Valley Pride. Labor contractors are used throughout agriculture but in this case Valley Pride is part of the same corporate family.

Management practices on the ground.

“On the ground” also has a literal meaning in this company. There is skill and teamwork required for the harvesting we saw, and each work crew is kept working together during the season and in subsequent years as much as possible. The top management looks for operations improvements by meeting directly with workers from each crew, without the foremen present. Almost everybody in the Ocean Mist and Valley Pride organizations speak fluent Spanish. The foreman and supervisor that we met had each been with Valley Pride for more than 20 years, and I believe each had started as field workers.

Consumer marketing

Ocean Mist devotes a lot of its marketing effort providing consumer marketing data to its customers, trying to help them sell more Ocean Mist products to consumers. This is a focus for many companies that sell indirectly to consumers through retail channels such as supermarkets.

Industry changes

By far the biggest changes for the leafy green industries have come since the 2006 E. coli outbreak. The industry went much further than addressing contamination between grazing animals and agricultural fields. There’s a consensus that the damage to consumer confidence in bagged salads and spinach was far greater than it could have been if better tracing, industry communication, and crisis management practices were in place.
The major response was industry’s creation of the industry group LGMA to improve safety practices. The first chairman was Ocean Mist’s Joe Pezzini, who led our field visit. Ocean Mist engages in regular emergency simulations to practice and test its processes.

More

Ocean Mist’s web site has videos showing the kinds of harvesting we watched:

Romaine Harvest Video from Ocean Mist Farms.

Spinach Harvest Video from Ocean Mist Farms.

An important concept for technical interviews is Big-O notation. Textbooks will have this under “asymptotic notation” but programmers just call it “Big-O”.

Basically, this describes how an algorithm scales as the size of input grows. So if you write a function that will take twice as long to run if the input size is doubled, it grows linearly, so it’s O(n) pronounced “Order N”

If the function has an outer loop and an inner loop around all input, it may be O(n squared). That means if the input size is 10 times as large, it will take 100 times as long to run.

You always use terms like O(n), O(n log(n)), O(n squared) with no coefficient. You never say O(2n). So if you have two functions that both scale linearly, but one takes twice as long as the other one, they’re BOTH O(n).

This is usually the most important consideration in evaluating the performance of an algorithm. So after you solve a programming problem in an interview, you should be able to say if it’s O(n) or not. Most likely if it’s O(n) you can then say that it scales well. If it’s O(n squared) it probably does not scale well and trying to come up with a O(n) solution. There are also O(log N) and O(N log N) algorithms but they don’t usually come up in interview questions. Most good sorting algorithms are O(N log N).

Big O notation is usually used to talk about execution time. But it can also be used to talk about the memory required by an algorithm that does significant memory allocation.

The company is going to save money by reducing turnaround times. Dealing with overhead items causes a lot of time before take-off. We’re passing this savings on to customers with an average $40 price cut, and if having an extra bag is important to you a $30 charge is reasonable.

If that’s all true, the industry has a pretty horrible media plan. Customers can get behind efficiencies if they understand what’s going on and they’re treated with respect. The industry should have tried to educated consumers about costs and turnaround times before adding on any baggage fees at all. But for this move, the P.R. battle was already lost, so long ago that legislation against the industry is already being drafted.

Our language already provides a term for people with the highest levels of trust and interdependence: family members!. In fact, when you reach this level of relationship with somebody you aren’t actually related to, you might even say they’re like family.

And in fact, the notion of backing a family member with the expectation of receiving a lifetime benefit isn’t really that new, is it?

The less a project or task or opportunity at work feels like the sort of thing you would do if this is just a job, the more you should do it.

If you haven’t climbed up as high as Seth on the value ladder, that advice might not quite fully apply. Most of us need to do the parts of the job that don’t speak deeply to us, in order to achieve the kind of success that will take us to the next level or just feed our families and bring home the employer-sponsored health insurance every day. I think I would rewrite it this way:

If you can’t learn from a project or task or opportunity, you should consider taking a new approach or doing something else instead.

In the competitive world of work, personal growth is a requirement. You can find something to gain from a task that you don’t really want to do. Either you can learn a new skill, you can do it better than you did last time, or you can have set a new standard for your own personal productivity by blowing through all of your mundane tasks quickly before they eat up your entire day.

4. Press random combinations of on-board controls that may have not been tested together, hoping to find some new bug that counteracts the acceleration bug.

3. Pull out my smart-phone and, using speech recognition, search the Internet for advice on what to do in this particular situation.

2. Use the phone keyboard for a new search, if speech recognition is not accurate enough given the audio environment within a car experiencing rapid acceleration. After all, if there are any passengers in the car they will probably be screaming.

1. Crash into something, push the car back to where I noticed the acceleration problem, and try again. Because what’s the point trying to fix a problem that doesn’t even have a repro case?

Everything is personal. I think I was successful because I understand my strengths and how to motivate myself. A week or two into recording calories in my crazy pocket Excel spreadsheet, I just knew I would stick with this and it would work. Yet, I wouldn’t recommend this exact system to anybody else unless I knew they had a similar introvert-intellection-achiever personality mix.

The first 30 days was key. After that, my appetite had adjusted to get used to 1800-1900 calories per day and I had figured out my own practical tips for sizing meals and snacks to that amount.

The report from the first 60 days is at http://blog.dylansalisbury.com/2009/08/29/diet6/

Here’s the final graph!

… never mind, this thing will probably never catch on. Forget it. I’m going to go back to working on something else now.

This program shows off some of the power of JavaScript (technically, ECMAScript). The power isn’t in the language itself, which has plenty of limitations and oddities… the power is how the language is used across the Internet.

Every computer and many phones have JavaScript-enabled web browsers, so they can all run this calculator offline by simply loading the HTML file. No need to install anything first. The JavaScript functions can easily be re-used by some other program.

Here is a link to the calculator, which I can’t include directly on a WordPress blog. You should be able to use Save As to write it to a local HTML file that can be used without any Internet connection.

A few years back I started tracking my weight and calories using the Hacker’s Diet method but I ran out of patience, especially with calculating calories. I also tired from the unnecessary effort of keeping a perfect record of my food intake and producing unnecessarily interesting spreadsheets.

Fortunately, I know myself a lot better now. I set out on a new plan to record my daily weight, calorie intake and exercise as simple daily sums, without setting stricts limits or goals for myself.

I figured I could use the basic Hacker’s Diet formula backwards to estimate my metabolism rate. If the metabolism estimate was within a reasonable range (I’m 5’8″ and overweight so my metabolism should be somewhere between 1800-2400 calories per day) and if I found that I could regularly eat less than that amount, I would conclude that the diet would work for me and make a more specific plan.

Here are the results after 60 days. The green lines are my weight (exponentially smoothed average), then 10- and 30- day moving averages of my “implied metabolism”.

• My recent implied metabolism while dieting is around 2200.
• No practical problems should prevent me from continuing to lose weight this way. I just need to eat small portions, keep recording calories, and exercise occasionally.
• During the first 30 days I frequently felt hunger and weakness, but exercising helped me feel better.
• During the second 30 days, I noticed myself eating more just because I was bored.

So, I’m willing to set a public goal: By the end of the year, weigh 180 or less.

That’s 17 more weeks and 8.5 more pounds, so I just need to maintain a weight loss rate of 0.5 pounds per week or a calorie deficit of 250 per day. I expect to be able to do this by eating 1900 calories daily (net of exercise), because my implied metabolism is around 2200 calories per day. If I’m not on course for this in another 60 days, I’ll probably find this goal motivating enough to evaluate and adjust my behavior.

“‘The future is literally in our hands to mold as we like. But we cannot wait until tomorrow. Tomorrow is now.’ – Eleanor Roosevelt”

Where? On a plaque above a bank of urinals in a men’s restroom at the California Academy of Sciences.

Photo: "urinals" by Bradley Gee, used under terms of http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

Suds summit photo from MSNBC

Because at work and home I frequently find myself thinking, “am I willing to risk looking stupid to try a creative solution to a thorny problem, even if my previous attempt just made the situation more complicated?”

In the suburban areas I prowl for coffee, the local places consistently struggle because they won’t invest in prime real estate like Starbucks does. Starbucks and McDonald’s have high traffic locations near big box stores and Freeway exits and they’re selling lots of coffee.

Now that Starbucks has set a national standard for quality and service of coffee drinks, and McDonald’s is moving into that market along with its own competitive advantage, why wouldn’t Starbucks move upscale?

And in the restaurant business, there’s lots of precedent for diverse brands with common ownership, though not corporate ownership.

I think this is a sign of the future, unless something about Starbucks’s brand inspires a backlash. But I think only college towns really have a strong preference against corporate ownership of coffee shops.

Sign taped to gas pumps at a Morgan Hill Chevron.

1. Introduction: Types of strategies and related research.
2. Learning and growth perspective: Hiring.
3. Internal business process and customer perspectives: Minimum winning goal.
4. Financial perspective: Align the goals of management and investors.

Enjoy!

Many BSC measures for investor perspective use traditional financial accounting metrics such as net profits or return on equity employed. However, many start-ups have success in early years that results in only meager financial results. Revenue growth may be accompanied by even larger expense, resulting in growing losses year after year. To make matters worse, many legitimate start-ups have a strategic plan that includes no revenue at all during the first years of the company’s existence.

Experienced venture investors understand this situation, so the dilemma can be resolved by considering other objectives and metrics important to the company’s investors. In fact, it is not uncommon for investors to define nonfinancial milestones which must be met before additional funding is supplied to a venture (Quillen, 2003).

In an ideal situation, the Minimum Winning Goal for the internal process perspective will also be agreed-upon goals between the key investors and the management team. This will eliminate the temptation for management to make poor strategic decisions to placate investors. This can also result in more productive discussions about corporate strategy in the boardroom. Venture investors often bring a wide network of business connections and other resources as potential assets to their portfolio companies, but these resources will not be effectively deployed if the investors and management have different views of the company’s short-term strategic goals.

Unfortunately not all important milestones to investors will also be useful internal process goals. An extreme example may be the investor-focused goal of hiring an experienced CEO who can lead the company through a growth phase that the current management team is not prepared for. This is a valid goal of strategic importance that venture investors should rightly care about, but it would not be appropriate to focus internal process efforts throughout the company on CEO recruitment.

Corporate venture capital organizations have certain interests not always shared by other venture investors. Accel Partners, a firm that operates traditional venture funds as well as assisting with CVC activities, defines the following unique goals for CVC units: Discovery of innovative technologies, creation of relationships with entrepreneurs, and expansion of markets for existing products (Accel Partners). The latter goal in particular may be appropriate for any Investor perspective scorecard but not found on the Internal Process scorecard.

References in this post:

Accel Partners. (n.d.). Corporate Venture Capital: An Untapped Weapon.

Quillen, J. L. (2003, February). Creative Use of Milestones Can Unlock Venture Capital.

As noted in (Burgelman & Siegel, 2007), many start-ups can be categorized as being founded either on technology innovation or on an unmet market opportunity.

What are relevant measures for the internal business perspective? If the company was founded on technology innovation, management must be sure that innovative lead is maintained to support a sustainable competitive advantage. This might be measured in terms of raw technological and research progress such as patent filings and development of prototypes. It may also be defined in terms of having a substantial portion of the leading researchers in a niche field employed by the company.

If the company was founded on unmet market opportunity, this perspective may be served by a traditional BSC approach of identifying the core business processes necessary to meet customer needs.

For the customer perspective, both types of ventures are characterized by entry into emerging customer markets. Accordingly, acquiring initial customers or growing the customer base may have more strategic importance than increasing the satisfaction of early adopters. Additionally, appropriate metrics for customer satisfaction may not be well known because customers are still learning about the product or technology.

In many ventures, a focus on satisfaction of existing customers may not be adequate, so the company may consider the question “how do likely customers view the company’s and its products?” This may lead to a heavy focus on deep understanding of market segments and scrutiny of which prospects are targeted by sales and marketing activities.

(Burgelman & Siegel, 2007) identify a trap that ventures can fall into if the internal process goals are simply defined by customer acquisition. Company leadership may react to failure by choosing a more immediately promising customer segment even if this sharply changes the company strategy. The risk is that the “venture team will move from one grandiose but vague vision to another, or it will continue to focus on a set of feasible but fairly limited and unconnected milestones along a road that leads to nowhere”

To avoid this drift of strategy, ventures are encouraged to define a Minimum Winning Goal (MWG). An appropriate initial MWG will achieve some sustainable advantage and achievable in a 12- to 18- month time frame, enough to hold leadership accountable without placing too much limitation on the company to react to changes in its target markets. According the authors, an appropriate first goal will be “limited enough to be vigorously pursued with the company’s available financial and human resources, but big enough to provide a solid foundation for defining the MWG for the next 2 to 3 years.” (Burgelman & Siegel, 2007, p. 11)

Consumer-oriented businesses often need a critical mass of customers in order for the expected “network effect” of the company’s services to create value for the entire customer base. The clearest examples of this are media companies developing social networking products. For these companies, it may be appropriate to use metrics such as total number of customers and activity per customer, because the risk of poorly defined customer goals will not be as significant as in other companies. Such companies may find that utilization of effective networks of customers is key to maintaining an edge over competitors (Voelpel, Leibold, Eckhoff, & Davenport, July 2005).

References in this post

Burgelman, R. A., & Siegel, R. (2007, Spring). Defining the Minimum Winning Game in High-Technology Ventures. California Management Review, 6-26.

Voelpel, S. C., Leibold, M., Eckhoff, R. A., & Davenport, T. H. (July 2005). The Tyranny of the Balanced Scorecard in the Innovation Economy. 4th International Critical Management Studies Conference, Intellectual Capital Stream. Cambridge, U.K.

Start-ups differ from almost all mature organizations in the expected amount of growth through hiring. This provides a number of challenges for the Learning and Growth perspective. A start-up will have relatively less emphasis on improving the learning of existing employees, and more emphasis on recruiting talented individuals and successfully incorporating them into the company. Start-ups must hire executives and senior managers, which may need different techniques for recruiting and monitoring than individual contributors.

One of Netscape’s founders, entrepreneur and investor Marc Andreessen estimates that roughly half of executive hires are successful, and the best CEOs will take at least three months to identify and replace the other executives (Andreessen, 2007). Chris Paisley, former CFO of 3COM and board member of venture-backed companies, said that this three-month estimate is accurate because it takes that long to assess the performance of any newly hired manager (Paisley, 2009). Even if the estimations of Andreessen and Paisley are pessimistic, the important conclusion is that simply the filling of executive positions is not an adequate metric for executive hiring.

A scorecard measure for successful executive hiring is difficult to define. It may be appropriate to assign a skilled human resources professional to assess the success of each newly hired executive through interviews with the executive’s subordinates and peers. As suggested by Andreessen and according with BSC principles, the CEO must be prepared to react to poor evaluations by quickly replacing the recently hired executive. This may be the single part of the BSC which should be confidential, shared only between one or two top executives, the board of directors, and the person performing the executive evaluations.

Successful growing technology companies have been known for setting very high standards for bringing new employees into the company. Two of the most famous technology company founders of all time, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, are both known for evangelizing the motto “A players hire A players, and B players hire C players,” meaning that lowering the hiring standards a small amount would eventually lead to a very significant drop in the quality of employees (Spolsky, 2000) (Zito, 1983). During its most prolific stage of hiring, Google was well known for its very thorough candidate screening process and demanding interviews (Vogelstein, 2004).

Accordingly, scorecard measures must evaluate the quality and performance of new employees in the first months after being hired. Paisley also recommends following up with every employee who leaves the company voluntarily after about two months after separation to get a candid assessment of why the employee left (Paisley, 2009). Management should be prepared to react to problems by seriously changing recruiting, screening, and interviewing practices in any part of the organization.

References in this post

Andreessen, M. (2007, August 28). The Pmarca Guide to Startups, part 8: Hiring, managing, promoting, and firing executives.

Paisley, C. (2009, February 2). (D. Salisbury, Interviewer)

Spolsky, J. (2000, March 23). Command and Conquer and the Herd of Coconuts. Joel on Software.

Vogelstein, F. (2004, December 24). GOOGLE @ $165 Are these guys for real? Fortune.

Zito, T. (1983, September). How to Hire Insanely Great Employees. Folklore.org

It is widely known that a majority of start-up companies fail early in their life cycle. This may be an unavoidable result of risks associated with developing new technology and entering emerging markets. Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is a commonly known system for developing and implementing strategy for large corporations. However, there is no corresponding widely communicated approach to establish and manage a successful start-up strategy while mitigate the various risks that are particular to new ventures. The conventional wisdom is that venture capital investors mitigate these risks by preferring to back experienced entrepreneurs.

In a few upcoming posts I’ll discuss how the BSC approach to developing and managing corporate strategy can be applied to a technology-driven start-up company. Although methodologies for developing and implementing a BSC program have been widely documented in articles such as (Kaplan, 2000), special factors must be considered in setting goals or measurements for each of the four BSC perspectives for such a company. I’ll examine these challenges and present some recommendations for developing the elements of BSC and for evaluating corporate strategy in the context of the four BSC perspectives.

Categorization of start-up strategies

(Burgelman & Siegel, 2007) differentiate between ventures founded from technological breakthrough and those founded from insight into market need. In the former category, the early life of the company is spent turning technology into a practical product, and engaging with potential customers to understand how to the innovation can best be marketed and sold. Strategic success for these companies may be defined by maintaining innovative leadership and establishing initial sales.
In contrast, companies that are founded to capitalize on a new market opportunity are often concerned with being the “first mover” into a promising market segment.

These companies are more likely to define early strategic success in terms of sales, market growth, and competitive positioning.

Related research

There are few or no public accounts of a Balanced Scorecard being developed during the early stages of a technology-driven start-up company. In the late 1990’s Siemens AG took a Balanced Scorecard technique to develop and manage its Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) unit, Siemens Venture Capital. Although this scorecard was used to run an investment unit rather than to run an operating company, some of the lessons from the Siemens experience may be applied to a start-up that is funded by venture capital. Fundamentally this BSC experience can be used to help understand the goals of venture investors and how they differ from investors in established companies.

Siemens Venture Capital decided to combine the Learning and Growth and Customer perspectives into a single “Strategy and Market Perspective” because the processes for satisfying the unit’s customers were highly “people-related.” Goals in these sections focused on relationships between organizations, and measures included number of events attended, number of co-investments, and response times to external communications (Bassen, Blasel, Faisst, & Hagenmüller, 2006, p. 430).

Because Siemens’s strategy including developing technology that could eventually increase the profits of the entire company, the financial perspective included actions to create value that would not immediately be realized at profit contribution.

The internal process focus addressed the challenge of running a small but worldwide organization of knowledge workers. Measures and actions targeted successful and productive communication within the organization.

During the first seven years of its BSC process, the most significant changes to Siemens Venture Capital’s BSC were to adjust the goals of the strategy/market and internal process perspectives to react to changes in the venture capital industry (Bassen, Blasel, Faisst, & Hagenmüller, 2006, p. 434).

References in this post

Burgelman, R. A., & Siegel, R. (2007, Spring). Defining the Minimum Winning Game in High-Technology Ventures. California Management Review, 6-26.

Kaplan, R. S. (2000, September-October). Having Trouble with Your Strategy? Then Map It. Harvard Business Review, 167-176.

Bassen, A., Blasel, D., Faisst, U., & Hagenmüller, M. (2006). Performance measurement of corporate. International Journal of Technology Management , 33 (4), 420-437.

I can’t help thinking that Twitter is going to run into a spam problem that will limit its growth at something near its current use.  My thinking goes something like the following.  I would love for someone to show that I’m wrong, especially if they can identify particular misunderstandings or false assumptions in this logic:

a. Twitter use happens through direct following and text search.

b. Any viral or explosive use of Twitter is going to be based on text search (I think that’s how it’s happened so far, but I might be wrong).

c. Heavy use of twitter search encourages twitter spam which can easily limit the effective usefulness of a ny heavily used twitter search term.

d. The fundamental solutions to this kind of spam are follower-of-follower networks or richer tagging or import systems.

e. These kind of systems already exist with technical maturity and large user bases (such as the open blogosphere, Facebook, LinkedIn), so there’s not much reason for Twitter to be enhanced to compete with those.

f. What will survive is direct following, celebrity blogging, and limited open search among a “geek media” community.

The conclusion for me is that Twitter has created two significant things:

1. A community of users who are excited about communicating with each other over a new medium.  In a sense Twitter is akin to a 1980’s era BBS.  This community is significant in the lives of its members, in large part because of the members themselves have a shared interest in social technology.

2. A trendy platform for celebrity blogging.  For now, Entertainment Tonight advertises its Twitter streams on the TV show, and it catches attention because Twitter is hot right now, but eventually the show’s staffers will microblog directly on etonline.com.  Twitter doesn’t offer any long-term value to Entertainment Tonight, just short term value based on a trend and curiosity of its viewers.

Maybe twitter can be a long-term platform for celebrity blogging if it’s really better for celebrities to microblog on twitter.com slash something instead of their own domain, or even a rich platform like Facebook.  But I just don’t see that happening.

I think we will look back at Twitter as an important era in the development of social media, and the community will have a big effect on many people’s lives for a few years.

First of all, huge thanks to the team that organized the event, which included Venkat Jonnalagadda, Meher Shah, Swetha Sirupa, and other members of the Entrepreneurs’ Connection.  Thanks also goes to the contest judges, B.V. Jagadeesh from Inventus Capital Partners, and SCU Professors David Weir and Carl Steffens.

Most of what I learned came from preparing for the contest and including recent lessons from Professor Desmond Lo’s Marketing Strategy course.  What I gained afterwards was mostly a confidence boost and some contacts, because I won the contest (woo hoo!)
This contest required a pitch for a company or contest that hadn’t yet been launched.  I had to consider some of the most important aspects of a new venture such as

• Identifying a large market opportunity
• How a small company could build a sustainable competitive advantage
• A first offering to use to lanuch the company from seed capital

But I didn’t deal with some other real-world concerns, particularly:

• How I would recruit a founding team.
• Appropriate amount of primary research or prototype to do before launching or asking for venture capital.

For this contest, I started with a couple of product ideas that had been kicking around in my head.  I looked for marketing research to support their viability, until I hit on a larger market opportunity that I could articulately defend — a difference between how.small and medium-sized companies spend on IT, and a new category of products that could save one of them money.

From there, I worked backwards to define a strategic competitive advantage that could support the survival of a new venture, and reworked one of my original product ideas — now instead just being an interesting idea, I could pitch it as a way to enter a multi-billion dollar market!

Putting a 2-minute speech together was another difficult task.  I also worked backwards in the final pitch, from market opportunity to copmany competitive advantage to product.  It barely worked as a 2-minute speech, I ran out of time and almost missed an important part of the product description.

If I make a similar pitch, I think I will omit a lot of the competitive discussion, because it’s extremely likely to to be the subject of follow-up questoins.  I would try to have a few great twenty-second answers prepared to those follow-up questions.  That way I would come to a two-minute presentation armed with three minutes of pitch.

And before I would pitch for any serious money, I hope I would remember how much I gained from the focused prep for this contest, record myself practicing, get feedback from colleagues, and get delivery ideas from other elevator pitches such as the TechCrunch elevator pitches that can be found on YouTube.

Here are two photos of work spaces that allow for osmotic communication:

1. Tellme, a Microsoft Subsidiary (where I work) – See http://www.tellme.com/about/careers and click on the second photo.

2. Noop.nl, home of prolific software management blogger Jurgen Appelo – See http://www.noop.nl/2008/10/how-to-do-many-projects-with-few-people.html

Which development teams achieve osmotic communication on their projects? Fortunately, Jurgen explains how they run their projects — trying to keep everyone working on one project at a time, seating the project team together, and having a project manager help keep distractions away from the team (although I bet the seating arrangement accomplishes 80% of that job).

You can’t see it from the photo, but at Tellme, we have longer projects that require deep involvement of more people, and for a number of reasons many engineers spend time on two or more projects each week. We also have an remote work culture that accommodates certain key engineers who work from home in remote locations, and some other engineers who work from home a portion of each week. So the flow of information is probably a lot different than the Noop.pl office even though we reap many benefits from the open seating arrangement.

Roles

The effective teams I’ve been on have had the following well-defined roles:

Team leader: Responsible for making sure work is fairly divided, meetings happen, members are aware of what’s expected of them, and any executive decisions that need to be made. Of course it’s still great when decisions are made by consensus. I’ve seen the team leader role can handed off during the quarter, either by plan or because the current leader is overwhelmed — both times it was effective.

Document editor (one per major document): This person is responsible for assembling everybody’s work and for high and low-level consistency of the document. This person needs to be very quick on communication and editing near the document due date. In a time crunch, this person has authority to make editing decisions or rewrite someone else’s work.

Schedule

Most projects I’ve been on go through the following stages:

1. Defining who’s in and out of the team.
2. Reading the project material and thinking about the key problems.
3. Writing phase I: Splitting up and working on research or background writing tasks (for example, analyze the competition).
4. Debate and agree on the project’s main conclusions
5. Writing phase II: Write the supporting text and conclusions (for example, describe the recommended marketing mix).
6. Final editing

This has worked well enough so far, but I wonder if there are major alternatives to this two-phase approach. This structure doesn’t guarantee equity of intellectual contribution, but the writing assignments in Phase I and Phase II can be assigned in a way that adds to an overall balance.

Challenges

If a participant has particularly poor writing skills, this isn’t noticed until the end of step 3. The work of improving the writing falls on the document editor by default, and the group doesn’t have an obvious way to allow this person to “redeem” his or herself by taking on a helpful role with less writing responsibility. With the project schedule described in this article, the only way a poor writer can avoid causing a big problem would be to self-identify himself or herself and ask to be paired up with somebody else for writing assignments.

Possible improvements

Professor Griffith recommends that the group get to know each other early over coffee or a beer. That sounds great but with everyone busy, this needs to be scheduled right away! Her post also suggests some alternate facilitator roles, but I’m not sure if a typical project team (4-6 people working over a 10 week quarter) allows for this.

I would really like to identify an alternative schedule to what I described above (which probably has different key roles), so that my next team can explicitly choose methodology A or methodology B based on the project requirements and team members’ interests.

So, I would like to hear more suggestions and I hope to follow up with alternative structures.

Look for another post on tools and technologies.

I took Managing Teams and Projects from Professor Bo Tep in Spring 2008. This is an elective course in the MBA program at Santa Clara University. I took it as a late-night class, starting at 8:30 PM, before the business school eliminated that schedule spot.

Instructor profile

Professor Tep had a career in the telecommunications industry before moving recently to academia as a second career.

Classroom experience

The most important thing to point out is that half of most class sessions was spend on presentations and activities led by a student team. Each team was responsible for planning two group presentations that taught something substantial while keeping the class interested. Most of these involved some traditional talking over PowerPoint slides, a teamwork-related game, and a follow-up discussion relating the game experience to the topic in question.

Professor Tep made a few things clear at the start of the course. First of all, the course is all about teams, and not about projects. Second, Professor Tep tries to improve the course from quarter to quarter, so some things students have heard about previous sections may or may not apply to this section of the course. Of course, every instructor should make conscious improvements. When I started writing this series of course reviews, this statement influenced me to be sure to phrase my essays as reviews of specific course sections, not as timeless reviews of the course or the instructor.

Another thing to note is that Professor Tep used some of the course’s main themes about adult learners to structure the course itself. Students were assigned to teams by Professor Tep at the first class. The teams lasted all quarter, and most of the course work was done within these teams. Each team was responsible for two in-class presentations and two group papers during the quarter.

Each class had a topic corresponding to a chapter from the textbook, Joining Together by the Johnson brothers. Some chapters were split into two classes. As I noted above, about half of each class session was taken by a presentation led by one of the teams. The remaining time was spent with a short prepared lecture and general class discussion moderated by Professor Tep.

Coursework, exams, and grades

Each team was responsible for two group presentations, a mid-term paper, and a final paper. Each topic was expected to be 8-10 pages on one of the course topics. Groups had considerable leeway to define the subjects of their paper. Two individual papers were supposed to account for a total 15% of the course grade, but midway through the course Professor Tep made the second individual paper optional.

What I learned

I took a deeper dive into some of the topics that I learned about in MGMT 501. Most of this learning was about topics chosen for my individual and group projects: Sources of power and status within groups, positive and negative outcomes of intergroup conflict, and conflicts arising from mergers and acquisitions.

I also learned some things about effective presentations, spurred by Professor Tep’s high standard for keeping the whole class engaged in the class presentations, and a healthy competitive spirit between project teams.

Professor Tep’s lectures emphasized the importance of building trust within a team and the group leader’s responsibility for candid 1:1 communication outside of group interactions. I learned several group work techniques that were immediately applicable to MBA course projects — so I’m particularly glad that I chose to take this course early in the program.

Criticisms

It was too easy to skim through many of the topics, and because some of the topics were not discussed deeply in class, I missed some of the core material. Part of this is due to the fact that group presentations and group-led activities – a major component of this course – took up almost half the total class time.

I think it the course could have been structured for more breadth if Professor Tep required individual papers to be on specific topics, or planned lecture time with a bit more structure.

Recommendation

Once you visualize yourself engaging in an hour or two of games during the quarter, and planning and leading two of these activity sessions, you may have an easy time deciding whether you want to take this Professor Tep’s MGMT 538 class! I believe that every MBA student at Santa Clara should consider this course as an elective. If you have your heart set on a career that does not involve any work in permanent or temporary teams, or influencing external teams or assisting them in conflict resolution, an MBA might not be the right degree program for you anyway.

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This article was first written in 2008 by Dylan Salisbury for dylansalisbury.com. All rights reserved. I added this paragraph because spam blog sites pick up copies of my blog posts.

For a list of course reviews and a disclaimer, visit my Course Reviews page.

Allan Chen posted a review of this course from Winter 2007 on his blog.

For me, someone more deeply involved in information tools, I have a problem of needing to get better at the right tools and keep current on what’s available, without wasting too much time learning about the new stuff.

Know the tools or own them?

Seth asks if you can imagine a metal worker not knowing how to use a blowtorch. But master craftsman go further and own their own tools (see Professor Terri Griffith’s post about this)… If you’re in this camp, you’ve figured out how to tweak your editor and be very productive with it, but then you will naturally be more reluctant to invest in a new way of doing things.

I heard a story lately about somebody who had worked their way up through a large engineering organization with an old-school Unix background. After 10+ years she was a vi master, but had never even heard of emacs. An extreme example which leads me to…

The challenge of staying current.

A big part seems to be to find a sweet spot of competence with tools that work for me and those I collaborate with, and still stay current on new developments.

For me, the RSS reader is a big part of keeping current. Another part is to have a few friends who are crazy about this stuff.

No — Let me back up — an important competency is to take in a bunch of new information and filter it effeciently. I’m gained some skills in managing my inbox and RSS reader, and now those seem very important to me.

For my own personal version of the Emacs-VI example, after reading Seth’s post I added something to my task list… “Learn how to publish a simple Google Spreadsheet”. Although I’ve been building competence in Excel to support my career at Microsoft and my journey as an MBA student, his post was an eye-opener to me that I’ve got to open my eyes to Google Docs too.

10. Allowing any mobile device to make any sort of noise whatsoever. This could have been avoided with some planning, unless an emergency brought you into the bathroom. If your devices are all silenced and untouched when you’re taking care of business, consider yourself a silent hero. There’s not a lot of glory in this position, but pat yourself on the back… but AFTER you wash your hands, OK?

9. A phone rings with a customized ringtone. A unique ring sound pierces any sort of feigned anonymity between you and others. You’re in the unenviable position of deciding whether to fumble around to silence the phone or to let your co-workers or business associates enjoy 30 full seconds of Groove Is In The Heart.

8. Carrying a laptop into the room and leaving it at the sink. This seems to happen when a busy person is hurring in between meetings. But, is this really the best place to leave it? If I spash your computer while I’m washing my hands, nobody’s going to want to explain the situation to IT. This action is even worse if the laptop is opened up because it’s configured to sleep or hibernate when shut. IT’S STARING AT ME!

7. Answering a call at the sink. Here’s where the list stops becoming funny. You may have a relationship with your caller in which the subject of this call is perfectly appropriate to discuss in a public restroom, but everyone else in the room will be threatened or tempted by the idea that their potty noises will be exposed to an unknown caller.

6. Answering a call in the stall. Now the hygiene axis comes into play, and we’ve clearly crossed over the “yucky” line. Once you experience this happening in a public restroom, you may think about it any time ANYBODY presents you an opportunity to touch his or her mobile phone.

5. Walking into the restroom while on a phone call, and proceeding to do one’s bathroom business. This is a show of audacity that is visible to co-workers on both sides of the restroom door! You have basically told all of co-workers that you view the work environment as a big college dorm, or something. Even worse if you were just listening in on a conference call and surprise everyone when you start talking at the stall or urinal. Hey buddy, two minutes ago when you were quiet and I was making a loud noise, did you have your phone on mute?

4. Placing a call from the stall. OK, you knew you were going to be there for a long time and your wanted to knock a couple items off your to-do list for the day. But did you have some other item on the list marked MAINTAIN CIVILITY WITH THE REST OF THE HUMAN POPULATION?

3. Answering a call at the urinal. OK, so you’re multitasking and ambidextrous. Yuck.

2. Placing a call from the urinal. I wouldn’t have even included this if I hadn’t witnessed it myself. Of the six billion plus people in the world, does any one of them really want to receive this particular phone call?

1. Walking into the bathroom stall with one’s laptop. Do I really want to know what’s going on here? I’m just going to assume that you need to see the PowerPoint slides to follow along with the conference call you’re listening to.

I started a new software project recently. In this project I’m the technical lead of a small group of programmers, but not their manager. We’ve all worked together to some extent in the past, so we have some trust and group cohesion early on as well as a shared understanding of the normal development methodology followed by our organization. This is the largest project I’ve led, so I spent some effort learning about the “right” way to kick off a development project. Here’s a few things I’ve learned so far.

Do your homework: The most significant challenges of the project need to be “sized up” before much work can begin. If you are the technical lead, your challenge may be to how to do this without taking all the interesting work from the rest of the team. There’s a different challenge if you are a project manager who is relying on your technical expert for this homework.

Get sign-off on an initial project plan: This is a lot harder than it seems if you don’t already have a single sponsor who clearly wants you to write a project plan. If your organization has a copy, IEEE Standard 1058-1998 is a great format because it forces you to address topics that might otherwise go unspoken at this stage such as risk mitigation and the external interfaces of the project team.

Hold a kick-off meeting: The best template I found for a kick-off meeting was actually from this article on a construction industry-focused website – check it out! I have a whole other article in mind about this meeting.

Choose a software development methodology with your team? Not so fast…

There are a lot of exciting ideas in the world of software development, and an egalitarian leader may want to set the tone right by letting the team democratically decide how they want to work. But this will only work once your group has trust in each other and confidence in you as a leader.

If this is a brand new project, keep the focus on your organization’s current practices. Show your team that you have some understanding of the best and worst aspects of the current process, and assure them that the team will figure out ways to avoid the pitfalls of the process that other projects may have fallen into.

I took this course from Professor Ling-Jing Kao during my third quarter in the MBA program at Santa Clara University. This is an introductory marketing course that all MBA students must either take or waive.

Instructor profile

Professor Kao is a recent Ph. D. who began her teaching career at SCU in 2006.

Classroom experience

Most classes began with Professor Kao handing out lecture notes and other material (already stapled and 3-hole-punched) then a student summarizing the main topics of the previous lecture. The class was structured as a lecture with a reasonable amount of in-class discussion moderated by the instructor. The content followed the pre-published lecture notes closely.

During a few classes, we watched videos (two video split over three or four classes) that described marketing strategies undertaken by two consumer companies. After the videos we discussed them briefly in class and tied some future lecture topics back to the videos. These video cases were the subject of some mid-term and final exam questions.

The basic framework for the material was provided by the Harvard Business School publication “Note on Marketing Strategy” describing on overview of the marketing process. We referred back to this again and again as we moved through the lectures and homework.

Professor Kao kept class time well balanced among lecture and discussion, and rarely let the class go very far off topic. Some of the discussions went very well, but there were a number of subject areas where she just didn’t seem to be able to answer students’ questions for one reason or another. Some of it may have been due a language gap, but I also suspect that Professor Kao is very well versed in certain areas such as consumer market research, but less comfortable fielding questions on other topics.

Coursework, exam, and grades

There were two exams and two group papers. Each was roughly 25% of the final course grade.

The exams mostly drew on lecture material and the video cases discussed in class. The exams were each part multiple-choice, part short essay question. A few of the multiple choice questions may have been on topics covered in the required reading but not in class.

The projects each involved producing a concisely-written 4-page paper that follows the marketing strategy model from the HBS paper. 4 pages isn’t a lot of text, although we were allowed unlimited exhibits, which could themselves be somewhat wordy. In the editing process my group critically evaluated which ideas and recommendations were relevant and which didn’t fit. I didn’t get much insight into how closely Professor Kao followed her own grading guidelines.

I came into this course not really knowing what marketing was, and by the end I had a solid understanding of the scope of marketing activities, where they belong in the business planning and execution cycles, and a very strong concept of appropriate and inappropriate uses of the basic types of market research. I used this knowledge right away to ask intelligent questions about marketing and strategy at my own workplace and in a start-up venture that a colleague embarked on.

Criticisms

Professor Kao didn’t add as much real world insight into marketing topics as I had hoped. I suspect that this is because all of her expertise is in market research and she has only a few quarter’s experience fielding discussions with graduate students.

Although there was regular required reading from the textbook (Kotler and Keller), it was easy for me to skip the readings and keep up with the class until I hit those few exam questions that relied on the text. Professor Kao indicated that she thought the text was difficult to work with, but she expected us to read it because it is a widely used textbook that almost every MBA student is familiar with.

Another student described this course in general (not just Professor Kao’s section) as being an simple undergraduate Marketing course packaged as a graduate course. That might be somewhat valid, but for the group of students in my course, starting an MBA program without this knowledge, the content seemed appropriate.

Recommendation

I would recommend taking this course from Professor Kao because it was well structured and covered the basic marketing model and market research techniques thoroughly. Because Professor Kao doesn’t have industry experience, a different instructor with a professional background may add a lot of value for many students. Also, if you are a new MBA student who already has some marketing education you should consider waiving this course altogether.

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This article was first written in 2008 by Dylan Salisbury for dylansalisbury.com. All rights reserved. I added this paragraph because spam blog sites pick up copies of my blog posts.

For a list of course reviews and a disclaimer, visit my Course Reviews page.

Ian is the Empire

This Microspotting promo T-shirt has been happily relocated to sunny California — as promised. Here’s a shot of it outside the Tellme NOC with Ian Bone, Platform Engineering intern. Thanks, Ariel!

I took Managerial Accounting from Ahmad Hosseini in Winter 2008, my second quarter in the MBA program. This was the first quarter that introductory managerial accounting was taught as a separate course to graduate students. Before this, ACTG 301 combined financial and managerial accounting.

Instructor Profile

Professor Hosseini has an extensive international academic career in accounting that includes rising to Dean of Sonoma State University’s business school then going to Africa as Founding Dean of the American University of Nigeria’s business school. At Santa Clara he runs the Certificate in Advanced Accounting Proficiency program in addition to lecturing.

This course covers the basic concepts of Managerial Accounting, and Professor Hosseini kept the class focused in this content.

Classroom Experience

The majority of each class was a prepared lecture. These lectures were based on PowerPoint slides provided by the textbook publisher, but they had been edited somewhat by Professor Hosseini, who also added on some other examples.

Before each homework assignment was due, Professor Hosseini walked through solutions to practice problems which were generally very similar to the homework problems. These were presented on the computer display and were pretty easy to follow.

Before the first day of class, Professor Hosseini organized the class into 9 groups of 4 or 5 people by order of last name. These were teams who did two brief class presentations during the course (more on this below).

There was not much Q&A or student interaction during the class except during the team presentations. I think this was mainly Professor Hosseini’s style, as he wanted to fit a lot of the core content into the course and already had enough structured presentation material to fill each course. Professor Hosseini did call on students to answer questions during the class, but there wasn’t much open-ended discussion or exploration of other aspects of accounting.

Coursework, exams, and grades

The almost-weekly homework assignments took a bit of time, but they were not too hard because of the sample problems that were covered in class. Many students, including me, spent a lot of time lining up tables properly in Excel. The wiser students did the homeworks using pencil and paper, which helped them prepare similar tables during the exams under time pressure.

Two mid-terms and a final exam made up the majority of the class grade. Individual problems were not very hard, but all three exams presented a time crunch for most students. Each exam had a lot of low-credit multiple choice questions. To me, some of these questions were easy but others took as much time as the non-multiple-choice problems.

Each team prepared two 15-minute presentations for homework problems that were somewhat open-ended and subject to interpretation and opinions. These could generally be prepared with one or two in-person meetings the week before, and a little coordination over e-mail. These were good learning experiences for me, and the Q&A sessions between other students and the presenting teams were also useful.

What I learned

I learned the core concepts of managerial accounting. Not having any experience with any kind of manufacturing company, I got some initial insight into the financial and planning considerations faced by a company with a multiple stage production system.

Criticisms

Several students in my section were unhappy with Professor Hosseini’s lecture style. I beleive this was due to the speed of his lecture and the fact that he was not very interactive with students during the class. There might be other reasons that I misunderstood.

As an MBA student who is probably never going to work directly an accounting or finance, I would have preferred a class experience that tought me more about the practical impact of accounting principles on decisions faced by managers throughout a company (something I got a lot of insight into from Paisley’s Financial Accounting course). In other words, I think I wanted to learn how to work with managerial accountants rather than how to be a managerial accountant.

The course syllabus was revised several times during the quarter, and from the start it was not very clear exactly what day each homework set was due until a class or two beforehand. This was distracting, but because it was the first quarter ACTG 302 was ever taught I expect this will not be as much of a problem in the future.

Recommendation

If you are considering a professional or academic career in accounting, you should get to know Professor Hosseini. It is clear that he has a tremendous amount of knowledge and contacts about the accounting and business worlds that we barely touched on during this class. I suspect that he would also be a good instructor to take an advanced accounting course from.

For an MBA student who is looking at ACTG 302 as a required course, you can expect to learn the fundamentals in this course with a predictable class structure and amount of work required.

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This article was first written in 2008 by Dylan Salisbury for dylansalisbury.com. All rights reserved. I added this paragraph because spam blog sites pick up copies of my blog posts.

For a list of course reviews and a disclaimer, visit my Course Reviews page.

I took Organizational Analysis and Management, a.k.a. Organizational Theory, from D. R. Palmer in Winter 2008.

This course is currently required for all non-executive MBA and MSIS students at Santa Clara.

Instructor Profile

D. R. Palmer, not to be confused with the tenured management instructor who is also named David Palmer, is a lecturer at Santa Clara University and management consultant. He also leads workshops through Santa Clara’s Executive Development Center. Palmer has a range of academic credentials including study under Peter Drucker.

I’d better get the main theme of this course review out early: Dr. Palmer is passionate about giving career advice and coaching on career growth, but perhaps not so passionate about Organizational Theory. There was a strong emphasis on practical career advice throughout this course, and generally that is appropriate for a class full of working students who are near turning points in their careers. But that emphasis came at some cost to in-depth coverage of the core course content.

Classroom experience

Class sessions were generally structured as a combination of lecture and open discussion. Typically Dr. Palmer discussed something related to the homework or a career management topic then went into the chapter’s material. For some classes the chapter material review didn’t start until more than halfway through the class period.

Coursework, exams, and grades

The course grade was comprised from five short in-class quizzes, and individual project, a group project, and a class participation factor.

The individual project, Process Map Analysis was a project for each individual to research and map out their own work group in a number of different ways. The idea is to give the student new insight into their own work situation and opportunities for increased effectiveness and advancement. This was a valuable activity for me. Students whose employer had a “no public org chart” policy had a much harder time finishing this assignment than others.

The group project was the major work effort of the course. The class self-organized into groups of about six, and chose one of our employers’ divisions to do the project on. The project involves interviewing around six members of the chosen organization and producing a paper that analyzes the current structure and recommends structural changes.

My class generally found that some of the quiz questions were ambiguous. Students argued about a couple of them in class and won Palmer over. In Palmer’s defense, the entire cohort took ACTG 300 the previous quarter from Chris Paisley, who intentionally put tricky true/false questions on his exams that required careful parsing. Palmer was trying not to use tricky wording, but when the wording was slightly ambiguous we suspected a trap.

What I learned

I had a great experience with the group project, because I had a smart hardworking team and one of our team members got high-level buy-in from his organization to support our project. I probably learned the most from just exploring the current challenges faced by the organization and the historical and structural factors that led to them. My whole career has been in software development organizations, and it was great to see similarities and differences faced by an organization full of knowledge workers in a different industry.

From the individual project I got some good insight into my place in my company. Particularly, I started differentiating between direct power over resources and business plans and indirect power such as dependent work relationships. My work group is high in informal power — people throughout the organization rely on us to help meet their goals, and we have specialized experience and knowledge that can’t easily be replaced. Yet we do not have a comparable amount of direct power over financial resources, large-scale hiring, or setting business plans. This changed some of my long-term career thinking, which is the whole point of the project.

I don’t think I became too well grounded in Organizational Theory itself, but I learned many of the key concepts and terms and I’ll be able to use the text and other resources from here to keep talking the talk as I continue in the MBA program.

Criticisms

Not enough class time was spent on the core OT topics. Although Palmer’s emphasis on career planning was very appropriate for the SCU graduate student body, he could probably have cut the amount of lecture time devoted to this by half and had a more effective course.

Recommendation

I got a lot of value out of this course and the workload was manageable, yet I’m hesitant to give it a blanket recommendation because some students will be put off by Palmer’s lecture style. If you’re ready for some introspection on your career growth, think ahead about a project group you’d like to work with and a company you can do the project on, and take this course.

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This article was first written in 2008 by Dylan Salisbury for dylansalisbury.com. All rights reserved. I added this paragraph because spam blog sites pick up copies of my blog posts.

For a list of course reviews and a disclaimer, visit my Course Reviews page.

Update 2008-08-17

Allan Chen posted a thorough review of this class from the previous quarter on his blog. Although his review is more critical than mine, I think our reviews are very consistent.

I took Managerial Competencies and Effectiveness, a.k.a. Organizational Behavior, from James Hall in Fall 2007, my first quarter in the MBA program. This course is currently required for all non-executive MBA students to take during their first quarter in the program.

Instructor Profile

Professor James Hall is a professor at Santa Clara University and management consultant. He served two multi-year tenures as chair of the Management department, a fact he weaved into his lectures for this course.

Classroom experience

Class sessions were very well balanced between discussions of the current topic and a variety of structured activities. Many of those activities were smaller group discussions about the course readings. There was one role-playing exercise. Some other activities included self-assessments of leadership and conflict resolution styles.

Professor Hall was very good at answering students’ questions thoroughly while keeping the class moving. I got the impression that Professor Hall has broad knowledge of the research grounding the various topics covered in this foundational course. Why? Because many of his answers to student questions were prefaced with something such as, “the research in this area suggests….”

On a Saturday near the end of the quarter all students participated in a day long management simulation exercise, along with students from other MGMT 501 sections.

Coursework, exams, and grades

The course grade was comprised of two in-class written exams and a paper based on the simulation. Professor Hall provided study guides for the exams and was very clear on the grading criteria for the paper.

The grading criteria for the exams were mainly around being able to clearly explain the core concepts of the course or apply them briefly to example situations. In-depth writing or analysis of any particular topic was not required for the exams or the paper.

What I learned

Primarily, I learned a lot about my own work styles and preferences from the class discussions and exercises. I was also grounded in the basic concepts and lingo around organizational behavior.

The effective way that Professor Hall ran the classroom contributed to healthy norms and trust within the class cohort that started forming during this quarter.

Criticisms

I’m not sure if I learned enough from the management simulation exercise to justify the amount of time it took up. That’s about the only negative thing I have to say about this course.

Recommendation

Because this is a required first course, it seems unlikely that someone will find this article before choosing a section for MGMT 501. Based on my experience in this class, I would recommend taking Professor Hall for any course or workshop he teaches.

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This article was first written in 2008 by Dylan Salisbury for dylansalisbury.com. All rights reserved. I added this paragraph because spam blog sites pick up copies of my blog posts.

For a list of course reviews and a disclaimer, visit my Course Reviews page.

I took Financial Accounting from Chris Paisley in Fall 2007, my first quarter in the MBA program. This was the first quarter that financial and managerial accounting were taught in separate introductory courses to evening MBA students. Previously a single course covered both subjects.

Instructor Profile

For someone hoping as an MBA student will to learn the fundamentals of financial accounting along with a understanding of how the concepts impact board room decisions, there could hardly be a better instructor than Paisley. Beyond his former role as CFO of 3COM, he continues to serve on boards of private and public companies, including chairing audit committees. He teaches the fundamentals of accounting to undergrads, graduate students, and corporate executives.

Classroom experience

Each class followed a simple lecture format. Lecture outlines were available beforehand on ERES, and also displayed on overhead projector during the lecture.

During the first class, Paisley distributed the Brocade 10-K and presented an overview of the document. He referred back to specific parts during many lectures.

Paisley’s lectures covered the fundamentals principles and rules of U.S. financial accounting while tying them to Brocade’s filings and relevant stories of real-world situations he has experienced.

Paisley had a few particular points where his opinion differed from the textbook. If you take his class you will learn which technique for “managing earnings” is frowned upon by the text but considered completely legitimate by this experienced CFO. He was very clear that these opinions were part of the course content, and they were mentioned in his lecture notes and reflected in the exams as well.

Several classes ran late, including one that was interrupted by a medium-intensity earthquake! After each midterm, sessions were scheduled after regular class time to review each problem.

Two classes were devoted to presentations of the group projects.

Coursework, exams, and grades

Course grade consisted of two midterms, a final exam, and a group project.

Each exam consisted of true/false questions and a number of accounting problems. Many students felt that the true/false questions were trickier than they expected – some depended on carefully evaluating details of the sentence.

The group project involved digging into the public filings and earnings calls of a public company and producing a powerpoint slide with summaries and recommendations for investing in or lending to the chosen company.

Homework problems were assigned but not collected. Paisley monitored the ERES discussion board for questions about homework and responded promptly.

What I learned

I definitely learned the fundamental principles and rules of accounting and I got a sense for how they play out when company leaders make decisions and approve financial statements. The group presentations gave me some interesting insight into the different practices followed by some companies in particular industries.

Criticisms

Paisley’s lecture format and style is not well suited to a student who is falling behind. This is because the content moves quickly and he does not use alternative presentation styles to illustrate a concept that some students don’t “get” the first time. That being said, the core concepts of financial accounting are fairly standard and many resources are available to students who need extra explanation and examples, including free tutoring at SCU.

Recommendation

If you consider yourself to be a smart student and you see yourself in the board room someday, go out of your way to take this course from Paisley. If you have reason to think accounting may be a difficult subject for you or if this course description sounds intimidating, there may be another instructor with a style that works better for you. Like many graduate courses, you will need to do ungraded homework with discipline in order to keep up with the course.

Many students will benefit from recording the lectures and having them available for reference when studying for the exams.

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This article was first written in 2008 by Dylan Salisbury for dylansalisbury.com. All rights reserved. I added this paragraph because spam blog sites pick up copies of my blog posts.

For a list of course reviews and a disclaimer, visit my Course Reviews page.

ACTG 300: Financial Accounting, Chris Paisley, Fall 2007

MGMT 501: Managerial Competencies and Effectiveness, James Hall, Fall 2007

MGMT 503: Organizational Analysis and Management, D. R. Palmer, Winter 2008

ACTG 302: Managerial Accounting, Ahmad. Hosseini, Winter 2008

MKTG 551: Marketing Analysis and Decision Making, Ling-Jing Kao, Spring 2008

MGMT 538: Managing Teams and Projects, Bo Tep, Spring 2008

MKTG 553: Competitive Marketing Strategy, Desmond Lo, Fall 2008

MGMT 703: Measuring and Managing Corporate Performance, Joel K. Leidecker, Winter 2008

MGMT 619: Strategic Analysis (The Capstone Course), Tammy L. Madsen, Fall 2010

I intend these to be articles public records and choosing my words appropriately. Keep this in mind as well if you comment.

If you are using these articles to learn about the experience you will have in the course, note that these courses simply describe a particular section during a particular quarter, and many instructors change their class structure and teaching methods from quarter to quarter. Also, I don’t have enough information to compare how two different instructors teach the same course, or even how the one instructor teaches two different courses.

Some of my reasons for writing this series of articles are to:

1. Critically analyze my experience in the MBA program.

2. Contribute to the public record about the courses and instructors.

3. Along with other articles, produce an account of my experience in the program that demonstrates that I was paying attention.

I’m publishing these on my blog instead of the SantaClaraMBA mailing list in order to allow myself to correct mistakes, add more information or even take them offline later on, and also to try to get more colleagues and friends reading my blog.

Here are other posts about my major experiences in the MBA program:

Elevator pitch contest in Fall 2008.

You are negotiating all the time, whether you realize it or not.

I can thank Dr. Palmer for this “Palmer point.” If this weren’t true, a software developer wouldn’t get much use out of a negotiations course. But in any learning organization where role boundaries are relatively flexible, a lot of negotiation goes on. Objects of negotiation may range from deciding whether and when a bug will be fixed all the way to setting individual goals and plans. More importantly, the parties negotiating are usually part of the same organization, and it’s likely that they will continue to work together, collaborate, and negotiate for years in the future.

Intra-company negotiation is an environment where it is essential to use collaborative methods and achieving outcomes that are aligned with each party’s interests, or at least those interested which are properly aligned to the organization’s goals.

Be aware of negotiation styles and your preferred style.

In the “Conflict Resolution” lecture in MGMT 501, we were presented with the following chart, which is an important framework for talking about negotiation and conflict resolution:

^
|  Yielding    Collaborating
|
|       Compromising
|
|  Avoiding      Forcing
*---------------------->

The vertical axis is “Concern for the Relationship (relational outcome)”, and the horizontal axis is “Concern for self interest (substantive outcome)”.

For example, if you are negotiating for something important to you with a party that you will never deal with again, a forcing or “hard” style may be appropriate. In a typical work situation where both outcomes are important, a collaborating style is ideal.

In Professor Hall’s MGMT 501 course, I took a self-assessment which produced a score for each of the five styles. That was useful to me because it showed me a high score for Collaborating but low for Compromising. I learned that when I can foresee a real win/win outcome I am eager to dive in with a collaborative approach but when I expect that a compromise will be necessary I tend to avoid the situation entirely. For example, I really enjoy the goal setting process at work because I see it as an opportunity to get clarity on what I can should do help the organization while advancing my career. But during a project when I see my work headed towards a resource conflict with another project, I am much less excited about advocating for my project in a compromise on resource allocation or schedule adjustments.

Preparation is the most frequently neglected step of the negotiation process.

Simple preparation may include identifying the interests of both parties, the best alternative each has if no agreement is possible, and what my own minimum requirements would be to consider the negotiation to be a success.

This lesson along with “you are negotiating all the time” are the key takeaways from me. I expect that by being more aware and prepared for informal negotiations that I engage in on a day to day basis, I will be more effective.

Be aware of negotiating strategies.

Many strategies can be used to increase one’s control of a negotiation session by setting the time and place or coerce the other party into a procedure he or she does not want to participate in. To deal with day-to-day situations with integrity, it is probably most important to be aware of strategies that may be used against you and avoid being distracted by them.

One example of a high-pressure strategy is to agree to a compromise, then follow up with more requests as if the original agreement was not final or not completely understood. This puts pressure on the other party to give into the request rather than deal with an uncomfortable process of either asserting the finality of the agreement or re-entering negotiations and potentially putting everything back on the table.

Obviously, following up on an initial agreement with quick documentation is something that can prevent this kind of pressure technique. But if it happens anyway, the most important thing is probably to realize that it could be an unethical negotiating technique rather than actual confusion about the original agreement.

Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO and co-founder of NVIDIA, presented many of his thoughts on running an international knowledge-based company the Spring 2008 Leavey Lecture on Monday. Priya Natarajan, President of the student International Business Network interviewed Mr. Huang in a casual conversation dubbed a “fireside chat.” The primary theme of Mr. Huang’s remarks was that NVIDIA let a rather organic worldwide structure form as a result of its early formation as a networked organization and its subsequent pursuit of great talent around the world. Some notes and quotes on the main topics that were discussed are below.

The format for the talk worked really well – Congratulations to the International Business Network for setting this up. At the time, it seemed too much of the limited time was used up at the start by showing a video produced by company employees for a company meeting. But in hindsight the video helped to set the atmosphere for the conversation about the company structure and culture, and this was the most substantive of the three Leavey Lectures I have attended.

Notes on the main subjects of the conversation:

Comparing the role of CEO in a start-up to his role today: There’s no management in the early days of a company because there are no resources to manage. A big part of the job is continually raising money. Another part is leadership. (“Lead. Compel. Evangelize.”) Now that the company is large, leadership remains an important part of his job.

NVIDIA as a networked company: When the company was started in 1993, they found that the only way for everyone to their own e-mail client at their workstation was to use a network of Sun workstations. NVIDIA was started at exactly the right time to be a networked company from the start. NVIDIA started its remote offices in response to finding and hiring people who happened to live in a particular area. Some of these remote offices were, and still are, one or two people working out of their homes.

Cultural differences: Over time, the company acquired what Mr. Huang called global “sensibilities” – an understanding of how to operate in different cultures (countries). This was a recurring theme of Mr. Huang’s talk. These sensibilities apply to developing products that resonate with the culture, managing people working in the culture, and working with customers and business partners in the foreign culture.

Indian parents: Mr. Huang (born in Taiwan and raised in America) got a spirited positive response from the audience after comparing how to deliver an “average” performance assessment in America and how to do it in India. He said that if you simply tell a worker in India that they are doing an average job and meeting expectations, the worker will be very upset and their parents may call you to ask what the problem is. “I have met more employee parents in India than in all other countries combined!”

He recommends delivering an evaluation in China with a speech such as, “I’m really disappointed, because you can achieve such great things, and I expect much more from you than this.” This will be more readily accepted because the worker is probably used to hearing this kind of nagging from his or her parents all the time! [Editing note: I thought he was still talking about India here but another student corrected me.]

Outsourcing: Mr. Huang was rather frank here. First of all, he criticized the culture of other countries for not being aware of why many Americans feel threatened by the effects of globalization on the work force. “In a way, they are taking our jobs.” However, like any modern CEO he believes that by using all of the company’s resources efficiently the company will grow more rapidly and benefit everyone. He used the US health care system as a counter-example of a system in which inefficiencies in the system cause everyone to suffer.

How to best use the workforce in each country: Mr. Huang turned the table on a question of how NVIDIA is able to use the strengths of each country in the overall operations. He presented the examples of coworkers from America who have recently returned to their home country of India or China. Did the Indian suddenly change from a computer architecture expert to a software QA engineer when he got to India? Should the Chinese programmer start working on PCB boards?

The network is the computer, or the display is the computer? Mr. Huang presented a vision where the network becomes to ubiquitous as to disappear, and the only part of a computer that the user is conscious of is the display.

The loosely connected organization: Mr. Huang believes that NVIDIA has an “organic architecture” as a company without a well-defined org chart and little emphasis on strict direct reports. He himself has 16 direct reports and is comfortable not having weekly 1:1 meetings with each member of his staff. He believes in using informal e-mail updates to make sure everyone is working in the same general direction, but also having them work towards a few important KPIs (key process indicators). He emphasized that the company relies on innovation and serendipity, which cannot be clearly predicted.

Contributing to multiple products: In an after-speech conversation with some students, he said that the company is able to produce more products than its competitors, but because each employee contributes to many products, an employee may not feel the same sense of craftsmanship that he or she would have from a larger role on one particular product.

Those are the main things I took away from the speech, aside from the fact that Mr. Huang is a very comfortable extemporaneous speaker with a healthy sense of humor. I left out some of the personal stories and I probably missed a few important points.

Altogether, this was a good event to start out the quarter with, and as far as I hope the next lectures are as interesting as this one.

[Editted 2008-04-04 to say that the parental-lecture style of performance evaluation was about China rather than India.]

Actually this article reinforced many of my reasons for choosing to go to Santa Clara, and the logic probably applies to many Leavey students:

1. Most of the “MBA is not worth the cost” logic is true but it includes the assumption that the student is taking two years off from a decent career and paying full MBA tuition. Almost all part-time students have chosen to either keep their jobs, allow for the possibility of working while in school, or remaining primary caregivers for their children. As a recent thread on the SantaClaraMBA mailing list has shown, many have employers that are paying a significant portion of the salary as well. Part-time MBA students are paying a cost in lost spare time, increased stress, and short-term career opportunities, but it’s nothing like the assumed cost of putting a career on hold to go full time.

2. For the most part, Leavey students have decided to forgo enrolling in a program with a strong recruiting machine in return for not moving or traveling. Note that there are plenty of part-time students who are willing to travel, I know several accounts of people who’ve flown into Berkeley on the weekends or commuted out of the bay area to attend schools like Duke and UCLA. (Also note that’s a separate group of highly ambitious people who decided not to go full-time). I think this means that we’ve started out the program having put more though into career planning and whether/how our MBA education fits in.

The best thing I saw in the article was actually a link away in another article by the same author which said: “Grad school is a bad way to deal with uncertainty [about your career goals].” I think this is very true with the major exception being an MBA program at one of the top-ranked schools in the world.

But the worst thing in the article had to be… “[if you want to be a CEO] you should be an investment banking analyst first. That’s because being a CEO is really about making decisions with limited information, and that’s what analysts do best.” But aren’t top CEO qualities also being able to influence people, and being willing and eager to accept the consequences of your actions? Being a competitive sports coach or a professional poker player sounds like better preparation, quite honestly. OK, I-bankers also meet influential people, and they spend a lot of time selling things, which are probably also important. Is there a string of investment-bankers-turned-successful-CEOs that I’m not aware of?

A related post is What I learned about business school before starting.

• I found a couple more hours in the day! It sounds kind of silly, but even though I don’t plan every hour of the day, I’ve found myself spending more time doing the things that are important to me. This is most notable during my train commute. I still don’t schedule that time, but now I always have a task at hand that I can spend an hour on and will give me a sense of accomplishment towards one of my goals. So I just do that task. Outside of work it feels like I have more family time because I’m less conflicted about my priorities, and my week-to-week planning is more realistic.
• I worry much less about projects I’m not getting done, because I’ve rationalized why they’re low priority or else I’ve just planned or done them.
• My dreams about the future have become focused. I’m one of those people who can be watching a movie or something, and for a half an hour I’ll zone off thinking about “what do I want to do when I grow up.” (OK, I have a successful career and a family and all that, but you know what I mean — I want to think about all the possibilities the future can bring and how I can reach them). Often this daydreaming would follow the same pattern over and over again. But in this past year it’s really changed, because I’ve found myself more likely to follow up each daydream with some research and actions. In the most extreme example of this, I researched and applied to an MBA program, which starts today!
• My calendar is totally together. I used to have separate work and personal calendars that were mostly up to date, but now everything’s unified and current and I love being able to rely on it. I still don’t quite understand why I love interacting with my calendar but have mental blocks about maintaining a task list, but if I can “crack” my task list like this that will be another breakthrough.
• Tasks, inbox, personal organization: I figured out much better systems for these, but I also don’t keep up with them on a daily basis. Although I feel like I should be more vigilant about these, practical problems with these being out of control pop up much less frequently.

My first source of inspiration was the PersonalMBA reading list. The reviews of the self-improvement books just sounded like a call to action for me. I decided to read a few books as slowly as it took to apply the advice.

I started with Getting Things Done. The top things I learned from this book are:

• Come up with one system to track all my open loops. The system doesn’t have to be perfect, but it needs to exclude reference material and unprocessed inbox input.
• Organize reference material with a simple unified system. I don’t quite have this mastered, but now I DO have a file drawer filled with manila folders in alphabetical order. 99% of my important papers are there, easy to find. I am still amazed that it took reading a self-improvement book for me to figure out how much better this is than the clutter I had before.
• Making serious progress in bottom-up organization may naturally lead to improved top-down planning. I think this is basically because the target of audience of the book is smart high-achieving people who have a practical organization problem. I think I was part of that group.
• Develop a habit of processing input (incoming e-mail, papers, whatever) into tasks, reference material, etc. This took time for me to develop (and I’m still working on it). The main exercise that helped me was to sit with an incoming e-mail long enough to turn it into a verb. Instead of just flagging it (“to deal with later”) I tried to figure out the right active sentence to describe the necessary task, (“Send release notes from November to Joe”). For me, an undone task carried much less psychic weight once I’d turned it into the right sentence with a verb in the imperative form!

I also read the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The main things I took away from it on this reading are the importance of planning important non-urgent tasks, and scheduling them out with dedicated calendar time a week or so in advance. Personally I realized I was already good at working on “Quadrant 3″ activities… but only in certain areas that I enjoyed and where the tasks gave me a certain sense of accomplishment.

One thing both of these books had in common (also shared with How To Win Friends and Influence People!) is a discussion of the value of dedicating time every week to evaluating what happened last week, where I am now, and changing my plans appropriately.

The book I spent the most time with was Now, Discover your Strengths. But, I am completely out of writing time now so I’ll have to delve into that in the future!

My goals for business school.

Which include:

• Get business knowledge that well help me progress on my current career path.
• Decide which fork to take on my current career path during the next several years.
• Evaluate and prepare for alternative long-term career paths including entrepreneurship in several different industries.

Unlike many B-school students, “build my professional network” isn’t one of my top goals. I expect improved networking to be a valuable a side effect of reaching my goals. This is because I already have a small network of smart, connected people. I expect to learn things that will let me provide more value to people in my network, and focus my career goals to understand how to better use my network. I do expect my network to grow to include more great people, but that’s not reason enough for me to go back to school.

My reasons for choosing an MBA program to reach those goals

I read some of the literature challenging the value of an MBA program other than as a filter for identifying ambitious career-minded people. Many people start from the point I’m at and achieve similar goals without school, usually by simply deciding to become an entrepreneur and using their network to recruit the best people they know.

I decided that I really wanted to achieve the goals I listed above, and a part-time MBA program is a good match for my personality and career situation. I believe I’ll use my experience in each environment to enhance the other. I’m also counting on my school adventure to be a healthy, satisfying outlet for the intellectually restless and self-driven sides of my personality.

Understanding these reasons helped me understand that it wasn’t important to get into the most prestigious program possible at the risk of stressing my family/work/school life balance. It’s not just that I’m susceptible to burning out so I’m choosing a less-than-ambitious school plan. Keeping my time in balance enough to thrive in all three settings is part of my personally ambitious plan to make the most of this school experience. On the other hand, if my goal had been to land a job at Goldman Sacs, I would not be satisfied going to Leavey and I would not seem so important to continue working as a computer programmer either — one of those future annual bonuses would be more than enough to pay off my massive school debt.

A reason to blog.

A while back I read Seth Godin‘s booklet “Who’s There” in which he listed three types of blogs (just checked, now there’s at least a fourth. But I’m trying to create a first impression blog. I’ll be meeting many new people in a professional context during the next few years. When new acquaintances look for me on the Internet would I hope they first find my Usenet post to rec.gambling.poker in 1996, or would I rather have them directed to something that showcases my professional communication and presentation skills?

Beyond the first impression, a blog like this is also a way to keep up my impression with people I “kinda know.” (Wait a minute, these are the same people in whom Safe Side Superchick is warning my children not to place trust?)

Blogs can be an effecient medium for keeping in touch with friends and family. But quite honestly, most of my friends and family news items are things I don’t want to post on the public Internet. It works out pretty well to distribute them using a century-old worldwide real-time voice communication system. And it’s part of my professional first impression to let you know that I have a family that’s very important to me without putting pictures or too many details on my web site.

* Thanks for putting up with my feeble attempt at giving myself some pre-boom Internet and pre-WPT poker credibility.

Greed is bad, creating value is good

When I started to read MBA program literature, I thought the phrase “creating value” were code words for “it’s OK to get rich.”
But, eventually I realized that companies and industries grow, they’re players in a positive sum game. In general, ethical business success moves the game forward and creates opportunities for others.

Although newspapers lay off workers as eBay and Google continue to hire, it’s not just a case of money and jobs relocating from one city to another. New businesses are able to start up and survive due to relatively frictionless marketing opportunities. (It’s a little more complicated the see journalism work shifting from large established newsrooms to amateur blogs and professional boutique operations, but that’s a subject for a future blog post or two).

A company CEO isn’t just the lucky guy who scored a job that pays 1000 times as much as the factory worker. The board chose this person as the company’s best chance to increase the value of the shares, possibly even as an alternative to selling the company, and paid the price it took to secure him or her. If the board did a good job, paying a different CEO less money would have been a bad choice, possibly impacting employees and customers.

Also, creating value is key to networking. Although it’s rather obvious, it’s easy to forget. Achievements on a resume can be impressive, but my most valuable contacts remember a positive experience working with me. They might want to recommend me not to repay a favor, but because the recommendations will reflect well on them.

Creating value is also one of the keys to successful blogging. It’s so easy to unsubscribe from a blog – I do it all the time!

There are no books on “surviving business school.”

Browse through the Test Prep section of Borders, and in addition to test prep you’ll see two types of books about law school: How to get into the best law schools, and how to succeed in law school. But for business school, it seems to be all about getting in.

Is this because business programs don’t have academic standards? Not really, but Master’s programs in aren’t supposed to have such high barriers to completion as doctoral programs.

The value of an MBA is often misunderstood

Although a bookstore might categorize them together, an MBA is not the same kind of professional degree as an MD or a JD. Those last two are necessary and sufficient (more or less) qualifications to enter a certain professional field. A PHD is necessary for academic jobs.

But for an MBA degree, where there’s some value in the degree itself (influenced strongly by the school’s reputation) there really isn’t any job that an MBA is a required or sufficient credential for. In business it helps to have knowledge, connections, and experience. An MBA program can be a structured way to progress on all three.
The top schools are part of the MBA recruiting machine, so in a sense an MBA degree can be a ticket to a job interview with certain companies.

Our nation’s current President, its only chief executive with an MBA degree, is widely regarded to have poor leadership and management skills. However the conclusion I draw from his story is one about nepotism in the admissions process, not one about business education.

Business School research is different.

I’m still trying to figure what B-School research is all about, and I guess the academic community is too (Businessweek article). However, I might have been drawn into a PHD program earlier in life if I ever found Computer Science or Math research to be as engaging, readable, and relevant as Professor Erik Lie’s web page summarizing his influential research into stock option backdating.

[2008-04-04 Update: A reader who wishes to remain anonymous pointed out that there is a company that makes a cup-holder accessory that fits a Harley Davidson.  I guess one man's humorous imagery is another man's unmet market opportunity!]

This is really a twofold question. The first part is, “what order of magnitude should the buffer size be?” In this situation, does it make more sense to read in 8 kilobytes, because that is the block size on the disk, or 8 megabytes, because there is plenty of memory to go around and those other 7.992 megabytes might otherwise remain available or be squandered by some less deserving process.

But the second question is much more critical. It is about hard numbers: exact numerical constants. The question may be: “Should the size of my 8 megabyte buffer be 8,000,000 bytes or 8,388,608 bytes (8 times 1024 times 1024)?” Or if you need a 1k buffer to hold a C string, “should the allocation be 1024 bytes or 1025?” This second question has more importance because you are much more likely to waste time trying to figure it out.

First Principals

The fundamental principal behind this kind of decision is that your choice is not going to matter. You should have chosen an order of magnitude that is larger than necessary, and the platform you’re writing for has a few extra bytes and CPU cycles to go around.

You should probably stop right here if you’re writing code for a Timex Sinclair, a 1990′s era refrigerator, or a CIA cranial implant from the 1960′s, because those are the cases where you might have a resource limit that matters to your little program. (Ok, I’ll admit that I don’t really know the details of CIA platforms for mind-control devices but I figure that if my iPod can hold a THX-quality recording of every speech Joe Biden has ever delivered, whatever thing the spooks put in my head can do something almost as impressive. But who knows, maybe Steve Jobs worked out some kind of deal with Langley, God, or Satan so he’s the only one who gets a really cool implant grafted directly onto his synapses and the rest of us are stumbling through life with the equivalent Casio calculator watches monitoring our thoughts).

Code Reviews

I’ve found the most common case where a decision about a buffer size gets discussed is in a code review. As the author of the program, you may be presented with comments such as:

“I think you should use a buffer size of 1025 instead of 1024 so there’s room for a C string with 1024 bytes and the terminating character.”

“The program will be more efficient if you use a size of 1024 instead of 1025 because it’s a power of 2.”

“Three thousand bytes? I don’t know how your momma taught you back in Hicksville but in the army we don’t just pull numbers like that out of our heineys, we use powers of ten or macros already defined in the system header files. Fix the code, Private!”

When faced with comments like these, it’s important to go back to first principals and remember that the number you choose hardly matters. So here are some possible actions you can take and the outcomes, regardless of the substantive nature of the comment:

As you can see, with the possible exception when some kind of canine tribal reorganization is happening within the company, the optimal response to all such code review suggestions is, “good point; I’ll do that.”

Edge Cases

Admittedly there are a few real world scenarios where the number you choose actually matters and the best choice is not obvious. Usually this happens when you are establishing a limit in an API that someone else is going to use, and requirements are not clear. Does your function need to support a maximum URL length of 1024 characters, or should you copy the results as a C string into a 1024-character buffer, allowing for 1023 characters in the URL?

Fortunately, I’ve again prepared a chart that breaks the situation into well-defined cases that make me feel pretty smug. Here they are:

Obviously, this one is pretty much a wash any way you go.

Conclusion

If there’s one thing I want you to remember from this essay, it’s how much time you wasted reading it. Because soon you are going to be faced with yet another buffer size decision, and you will have to try to find your reflection somewhere in your flat-screen monitor and ask, “am I going to squander any more of my precious time on Earth doing mental gymnastics about buffer sizes, or am I going to choose the largest possible value that could possibly be correct — or simply any value that is going to get me through the next code review — and move on with my life?”

In fact, the endorsement feature is making it start to look attractive as a general resume format. If your LinkedIn profile is at least as up-to-date as your resume and it also has endorsements, why bother keeping your regular resume updated?

OK, here’s where I start complaining.

Would you include a word like “visionary” in your resume? What kind of job would you ever apply for where calling yourself visionary, in writing, is going to help you out? Either you’re going to look arrogant, or you have accomplishments that clearly prove that you are visionary. If it’s the latter, you probably don’t even need a resume any more, do you? Your perceptive feats must speak for themselves.

So I did a keyword search and I have 39 1st or 2nd level contacts with the word “Visionary” in their professional profile — mostly right in the summary! And most of these use visionary as a NOUN! Here are some examples:

"Visionary, problem solver, ..." (Very first text in summary)
"Angel Investor/ Technological Visionary" (Job title)
"Recognized as a ... visionary"
"Visionary Entrepreneur"
"I see myself [as a] true visionary/entrepreneur" (from a 3rd degree contact)
I probably shouldn’t be complaining too loudly because most of these people have had more success following their professional dreams than I ever will. But I can’t see myself ever using the word “visionary” to describe myself with a straight face.

By the way, here’s the first definition of visionary as a noun from m-w.com:

one whose ideas or projects are impractical : DREAMER

…who completely underestimates the amount of work that will be required.

It took me a while to understand the power of wikis. But I remember years ago when I first used Bugzilla, it seemed to possess this great quality that was difficult to describe. The impressive thing was that it fostered this extensive written communication among developers, testers, managers, and everyone else who needed to know what was going on or could help solve problems.

I didn’t realize exactly why Bugzilla contributed to this environment, but it seems obvious by now. Everything is done from a browser, each individual operation is fast, and when you’re not sure exactly what to do you just add a comment and use the bug as a quick and dirty bulliten board. And the simple e-mail integration is also, well, wikirrific.

The most important problems get solved more quickly because more people can help.

OK, so maybe Bugzilla isn’t really a wiki, but it contains many of the same elements that make wikis great collaborative tools.

Meanwhile, in something like the Bizarro universe, some of us actually worked on significants project with no formal bug tracking system. Forget about a bug tracking system helping with the important problems, the real problem is keeping tracking of all the problems that don’t need to get fixed yesterday. What to do?