Wednesday, April 30, 2003

Period 2 Final Exams are over, and the predictable slight depression in which I find myself is a welcome change from the guns-ablaze ferocious intensity of the last six days.  I haven't worked that hard since, well, last period's finals two months ago. In the end, things went OK, below expectation.  The final for Process and Operations Management was too easy; I finished it just before time was called.  Since it was open book, I found the challenge to be organizing one's resources rather than learning the material.  Lucky for Lucky, I'm good at sifting through data, and during the exam I located a solution in a previous exam that was nearly identical to one we were given.  This is learning, but likely not the kind that the professor expects nor desired.  Serves him right, though.  Perhaps he should read the 1975 management classic "On the folly of rewarding A, while hoping for B". I'm going to dinner with a few friends tonight, and decided to splurge on a couple bottles of champagne (one Louis Roederer, my favorite) and a few bottles of Bordeaux.  After all, I'm going to school in France!  I should enjoy the scenery from time to time! Tomorrow Lucky is off on vacation, to a distant city on an island that never sleeps.  See you next week!   6:18:37 PM    comment []

I read Martin Lloyd's "The MBA Experience" blog frequently, and his choice of content has certainly influence what you read here.  He's been on a tear lately, with tons of great content, and I've only just gotten a chance to read all of it, since I have been busy with exams, studying, planning, running errands, seeing off friends who are going to Singapore for the next term, and practicing my attempts for the Guinness Book of World Record's Longest Run-on Sentence By Frazzled Student. Several comments, then, on recent topics he has posted: On Harvard Cases:  "Facts are effortlessly rearranged to present the everyday randomness of things as a coherent story. I'm sure this makes the subjects of the case studies feel all lovely and warm but I'm unsure as to it's usefulness."  I have been writing an essay on this in my head for the last month; it's tentatively titled "Learning By Case Considered Dangerous".  I agree that learning by case is terrible, because you are presented a set of distorted facts.  However, my complaints are centered on the inherent problems of survivorship bias in case studies- what is obvious in retrospect was never obvious to the main characters at the time; this fundamental discrepancy in decision-making perspective has never been mentioned by any of our professors, though they all acknowledge it when I press them after class. On Naomi Klein:  I haven't read No Logo, and my views of Klein run along the lines of Martin's classmates.  Most or all of my information comes from The Economist's book review, but perhaps I should read one for myself.  I think I'm convinced to do that now. On Martin Friedman, and "The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits": I read this essay in Ethics class (which I took as an elective; it's not mandatory) and again in Organizational Behavior.  In both classes it inspired some of the best debates I have experienced.  Some days I agree that business, as an entity whose purpose is to create value for shareholders, should focus on maximizing value (i.e. decide by NPV).  Other days I remind myself that there are situations where maximizing NPV would go against my moral standards.  There are more of the former days than the later.  Sometimes I think it's an enormous mental feat to have both of these ideas coexisting in my mind; sometimes I just think it's gutless.       5:59:02 PM    comment []