Monday, February 03, 2003

I took the "Business Career Interest Inventory" diagnostic today, which measures interest in various business-sey activities, like "Application of Technology", "Managing People and Relationships", and "Counseling and Mentoring".  You are then given a grade on each activity and a recommendation which ranges between "You should rule the earth!" and "Stop watching so much TV!" My "Personal High" score was achieved on "Theory Development and Conceptual Thinking".  Yes, I am not making this up.  Apparently I should be a management consultant or academic.  Does this help me in my search for a career, and a meaningful life?  Perhaps. 9:39:59 PM    comment []

Has anyone ever asked you "How sure are you?" and you replied "I'm 90% sure."  Do you really know what this means?  Perhaps you do, perhaps not... let's find out, shall we? In our Applied Statistics class, we took the "Self-Test of Confidence".  You can play along at home!   Self-Test of Confidence For each of the following ten items, provide a low and high guess such that you are 90 percent sure the correct answer falls between the two.  Your challenge is to be neither too narrow (i.e. overconfident) nor too wide (i.e. underconfident).  If you successfully meet this challenge you should have 10 percent misses - that is, exactly one miss. Example: if you were asked today's high temperature, your response should be "between X degrees and Y degrees", where X and Y vary depending on your weather.  Here in Fontainebleau I would answer: "90% sure that today's high temperature was between 0 C and 15 C."  Bon courage!! 1.  Martin Luther King, Jr.'s age at death 2.  Length of Nile River in kilometers 3.  Number of member countries in OPEC 4.  Number of books in Old Testament 5.  Diameter of the Moon in kilometers 6.  Weight of an empty Boeing 747 in kilograms 7.  Year in which Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born 8.  Gestation period (in days) of an Asian elephant 9.  Air distance from London to Tokyo in kilometers 10.  Deepest (known) point in the oceans in meters   Strictly speaking, this is a 10-times repeated Bernoulli trial giving a binomial distribution, but you probably don't need more details.  You're probably looking for the answers, but do jot down your answers first.  It only takes a few minutes, and it's really, really interesting.  Remember: you need a lower and upper bound for each response. OK OK, I know you just want the answers!!!   9:23:46 PM    comment []

We are studying brands in our Marketing class, and one of our reading materials is an article from The Economist cheekily entitled "Who's wearing the trousers?"  They proceed to demolish Naomi Klein's book "No Logo", and argue that brands are really at the mercy of their supporters, not the other way around, as it is now so fashionable to say.  But the beautiful line, more about the crassness of a CEO than a brand per se, was this: "Even mighty Coca-Cola ha been humbled.  Told of a contamination incident in Belgium, its then-boos, Doug Ivester, is said to have dismissed it with the comment: 'Where the @#$% is Belgium?'  A few months later, after a mishandled public-relations exercise that cost Coke slaes across Europe, he was fired." I know where Belgium is.  I used to work there. 1:04:00 PM    comment []

I just received the camera case I ordered from Pielframa, for my coolest Xmas gift, the Casio Exilim (NB: if you click on this link, you must overlook the initial marketing to thirteen-year old boys; it's really a great camera).  It's sleek and black and looks like something that James Bond would pull out at a cocktail party.  Sometimes it's the small things that make me happy. Back to cash flows, income statements, and balance sheets... and it's only noon! 12:08:21 PM    comment []