My Birthday

Happy birthdays and well wishes make March 5th a great day for me.  I hear these sentiments, but I am thinking about a much different set of concerns.  Feeling anxious, I am thinking about my future and what it looks like after I graduate.  I am beginning to realize that there is no career path for someone who wants to own a restaurant, a chain of restaurants, food production on a massive scale.  No, at business school they train people who manage industry, rather than building it.  A very scary thing for me is that I have internalized business school's way of ranking people into the way I rank myself.

I am grateful to Chris Weber, my career advisor, who pointed out that the only person I have to report to is myself.  There is no need to use the business school rubric in figuring out what the best job is for me.  His words are a relief, I've been stressed about this issue for a long time coming.

Do you know the feeling, when you are just working, and you hope that everything will fall into place if you just keep plugging along.  It's a defensive tactic, designed to keep us looking away from what we need to do to make something happen.  The thought goes something like this, if I just keep working on what I know and can do, what I want will happen.  In my experience, things do not end up working out like that.  You've got to look at your goal directly in the eyes and say, damn it, this is going to get done.  Turning away is only going to problems, which always arise.

Then why have I been keeping my head down in business school?  Why did I come here in the first place to put myself through a torturous program with no particular end in sight?  Why did I choose to put my head down and keep on working, working harder than ever if I had no end in sight?  I feel that it is because I had no particular aim that I focused on the MBA as a way trying to let the pieces of my future fall together.

When you just keep working, things have a way of moving along without you realizing it.  It's interesting that so many of my classmates came to school in a similar position to me.
 

Milestones

The past hour I spent looking at the classes I have taken thus far in school and the classes I will take in my last quarter at business school.  To my surprise, I have taken 88 units of classes, including the ones I am in now.  Looking over the names of the classes, and remembering a project or two from each, I realize that this was an incredible amount of work.  My grades show that I have done well.

What's surprising is that this work has actually paid off.  According to my initial calculations, I will only need to take 8 units of classes next quarter.  I am kicking myself for not having spaced out the work more appropriately.  It often feels that we are just running from one project to the next, never actually finishing this horrible rat race we are paying so dearly for with our time and freedom.  Apparently we have actually gotten somewhere.

Should I be upset with the fact that I have not paced myself so as to take advantage of some of the other things business school has offered?  I am not sure.  Part of me is upset for having missed out on taking advantage of certain opportunities, although I am not exactly sure what those were.  I also know that I found a certain degree of peace within the work.  It was cathartic to push so hard, endlessly toward something.  It is one way of fixing that feeling of floating around in life.  If anything, I am upset that my pursuit of work conflicted with my pursuit of excellence.  I believe that I should try to correct that with the remaining time I have left at school.  

Degree Requirements
Year	Quarter	Course Type	Number	Title				Units	Grade
2012	Orientation	Core	414A	Leadership Foundations				2	S
2012	Fall	Core	402	Data and Decisions				4	A-
2012	Fall	Core	403	Financial Accounting				4	A-
2012	Fall	Core	405	Managerial Economics				4	A+
2012	Fall	Core	408	Foundations of Finance				4	B+
2012	Fall	Core	421A	Communication Development for Leaders I				2	A-
2013	Winter	Core	410	Operations Technology Management				4	A-
2013	Winter	Core	411	Marketing Management				4	A
2013	Winter	Core	420	Business Strategy				4	B+
2013	Winter	Core	421B	Communication Development for Leaders II				2	A-
2013	Spring	Elective	263A	Consumer Behavior				4	A+
2013	Spring	Elective	266A	New Product Development				4	A
2013	Spring	Elective	407	Business Analytics with Spreadsheets				4	A
2013	Spring	Core	409	Organizational Behavior				4	A
2013	Spring	Elective	454	Fieldwork in Organizations				4A	S
2013	Fall	Elective	231E	Managing Finance and Financing Emergining Enterprises				4	B
2013	Fall	Elective	261A	Sales and Channel Management				4	A
2013	Fall	Elective	267	One to One Marketing				4	A
2013	Fall	Elective	279A	Cases in Real Estate Investments				4	B+
2013	Summer	Core	454	Internship at FIJI				4A	S
2014	Winter	Elective	220	Corporate Financial Reporting				4
2014	Winter	Elective	260A	Customer Assessment and Analytics				4
2014	Winter	Elective	297B	International Business Strategy				4
2014	Winter	Core	444A	Introduction to AMR				2
2014	Winter	Core	444B	Applied Management Research				4
2014	Winter	Elective	C156	Topics in Political Philosophy				4
				Units Have				88
				Units Needed				8

Why did I come to business school?

The classical music plays on my headphones, drowning out the silence of the library in sweet Debussy.  The music keeps me calm, an invaluable feeling in business school where stress is often my motivation.  Calm music clears my mind, allowing it to wander to more inward looking thoughts.

How did I find myself here, stressing about what I am going to do with my life?  I've been trying to take the observer's perspective as they teach in yoga.  Observing keeps one from making stress inducing judgements.  I've been stressing about my future since I entered business school over a year ago.  I came to business school to answer this question, and I am still looking for that answer.

I applied to business school after working for two on and off years for a company that was at best a bad fit.  Why did I apply to that company?  I graduated in 2010, and I completely failed to find any type of meaningful employment for nearly three months.  I had the horrible sense of unease that comes just after graduation.  I was like Benjamin in The Graduate, at the bottom of the swimming pool.  Looking back, I have to note that I wasn't very good at looking for what to do with myself.  Two years later, although I still had not learned what I was looking for, I did learn where to look for opportunities.        

Stress is a physiological response to one's environment.  It serves to focus the mind on one task.  Flee, fight, buckle down and write that important paper, they are all a reaction to an external force.  In my life, a mistake I have made is letting that external force decide what I was to do.  My reliance on stress comes in part for my persistent procrastination and my self destructive tendencies.  Back in my senior year of high school, I pioneered new ground in living without giving a fuck.  At the time, perhaps, I failed to understand what I was doing in life, but I can't really ask my past self what I was thinking then.

So, in my moments of stressless-ness, I can ask what is it that I want to do one, two years hence.  I know what some pieces of that picture look like.  I own a house.  I live with Ashley.  I am awesome.  I am successful.  Ok, but what do those things mean?

For me, success means finding external validation while being true to yourself.  Being awesome means living an interesting life.  Let's come back to being true.  Truth is reality unfiltered.  Truth is not manipulating yourself, especially not for someone else's purpose.  Truth is a correct set of priorities, Prof. Sarin's glass ball of family and friends, the ball you do not drop while juggling life.  Truth is being honest with yourself and achieving self expression.

Expression is always something I've had an uneasy relationship with.  First, I have a major block when it comes to formulating thoughts;  I didn't speak until I was two.  Expression is not something that is forced.  It feels like a conversation you are enjoying with a close friend over a drink.  Except that instead of speaking, expression can be anything.  For example, I am expressing myself all over the place right here.    

Girls, Season 2 Episode 6 "Boys"

What happens
Hannah gets ebook deal, has trouble starting
Jessa is depressed
Marine hosts a party for Booth and realizes she's not his GF.
Adam and Ray bond and then break up.
Ray cries with Dog.

Girls is about life not working out so well, and this episode is about relationships following that trend.  In each case, a relationship is broken by a partner's uncompromising nature.  Yet it's not all bad, Hannah begins to focus on her own writing, and not on convulsively reacting with people, while the problems in Ray and Shoshanna's relationship are left for a future episode.  Instead, Ray spends all his time with Adam delivering a dog Adam stole, back to its owner in Stanton Island.

Adam and his stolen dog's mini relationship demonstrates the episode's broader theme.  After it licks his face, Adam decided to steal "dog" from the owner who left it outside a coffeeshop.  The relationship soon falls apart as Dog's untamed behavior forces Adam to lock it in his bathroom.  A bad relationship feels like having a wild animal locked in some closet.  It's just a matter of time before someone gets hurt.  When Ray comes to Adam's apartment looking for a book, his insistance that the situation can't continue, leads him to accompany Adam while he returns of the dog.

Ray points out that he and Adam are kindred spirits as they talk on the ferry ride over to Stanton Island.  It's clear that Ray feels that he's found someone who understands him as the two talk about their past relationships with older and younger women.  The bromance ends, as Adam reacts to unkind words Ray has about Hannah.  Again, a relationship falls apart as one person's actions overwhelm the instigator of an argument.

The episode's more serious moments center around Marnie and Booth.  Their interaction with Su-Jin, Booth's assistant was awkward to an extreme, not only did Booth breakup with his assistant over ice creme, but Marnie seemed vulnerable, covered only by sheets.  Booth immediately has Marnie fill Su-Jin's role as a hostest at his party, and Marnie is only to happy to slip deeper into his world.  I hate to use the word relationship to describe what's going on, but Marnie gloats like a victorious girlfriend.  This last throughout the party until Booth tells Marnie that she is not his girlfriend.  He begins to smash wine bottles, exclaiming that he hates all his friends and that no-one knows him, while Marnie cries and admits that she was in love with the idea of him.

Seeing characters hurt and abandoned by a friend, lover, or dog allows us to witness how people dealing with their toughest moments.  Some like Ray, breakdown and cry, while others like Marnie can't outwardly admit what's going on.  This episode shows how a breakup forces a person to refocus on themselves.  It is relevant to what Hannah is going through following her brief love affair with Josh(ua) last episode, and it is encouraging to think that she may reflect on that experience in her book.

The Goal by Eliahu Goldblatt

I have just finished reading one of the most important books I will read in business school, The Goal by Eliahu Goldblatt.  This is not your normal novel, it is more like a tale from Aesop's Fables in that it is supposed to teach you something.  In this case the lesson is on production techniques in a modern manufacturing facility.  The book illustrates Goldbatt's systematic way to think about the obstacles facing a plant manager, but these lessons don't stop at the shop floor.  They can be applied to any "productive" activity.

The only time I have ever spent in a factory was a tour I took of a yogurt plant earlier this year.  Frankly, I know next to nothing when it comes to a supply chain, yet The Goal's system of logically identifying constraints and overcoming them doesn't depend on what type of factory you are in at all.  In fact, the book takes place mainly in a widget factory where all products are just known by their nondescript names, "The Model 12."  The book is similarly light on character depth, but while you are reading you engrossed thinking about the bottlenecks in production from your own life.  For me that would be reading and writing.  Not that I am illiterate, but as the year comes to a a close, I realize I have not completely finished one of the books on a must-read list I had made earlier in the summer.  I would also like to write more as well, but often find the process rather tedious. (Note the deliberate attempt at writing in this piece).  The book basically suggests that we would address my writing problem as follows,

"Define the problem." There is a constraint on my productive activity.  I do not finish the reading I would like to, and fail to write hardly anything meaningful at all.  Thus, I am the least useful person in my book club.

"What is the hold up?"  The real constraints I feel is the lack of time.

"Is there anything that can be done to overcome the constraint?"  Sure, I spend a lot of time bitching about things before actually writing anything down.  Cut that out and we will get straight to work.  As far as reading goes, I am constantly getting interrupted by emails and the like as I read.  A solution would be to set aside time for reading without these distractions.

And now that we have solved this problem to some degree we can continue to improve the process.  The goal is to apply yourself to a problem at the most crucial point at some fundamental level.  I clearly think that there is a broader lesson here to address some of the world's more persistant problems, but that will have to wait for next time.

Messing Up at Work

There are times when you mess up at work.  I just walked in 6 minutes late to a conference call.  Excuse, I was juggling too many things.  What was I doing, getting coffee from Starbucks.  I could have had my coffee and still been on time if I didn't sit to eat a sandwich too.   I thought I would get a lot of shit for this, but it was not a huge deal.  At my workplace, there is a lot of over-reaction to mistakes.

Then there are those mistakes that leave you wondering how messed up the shop is.  My company, not me, sent out a huge report with more typos than a dyslexic second grader's journal.  And the response? I haven't heard a peep from the big boss.  Either she doesn't know (information is being kept from her), or the mistake is so monumental that all one can do is try to fix it.

Berating people is destroying them a little, so they can build themselves back up again.  This has happened to me many times over the course of my short career.  Those trying moments have been some of my best learning experiences even though, I wish they had never happened.   

Post on Philosophy Now's Forum

For those of you that may have listened to the http://www.philosophynow.org/podcasts#Global_Capitalism_-_Good_or_Bad podcast and felt like you took nothing away this post is for you. That program devolved into just another discussion on saving the banks and a complaint about the system, but it failed to explain why our society is so wed to capitalism. 

Economics is the study of how we as a society, individuals, groups, etc. allocate our limited resources for productive purposes. Our limited resources include everything from our time, our knowledge, our blood, our natural resources and nearly everything a human can bring to bear on the world around them. Production is the means by which we produce things that we want. For example, I am using my time and computer to create this post right now. Hopefully, when I have finished this production I will have satisfied a human need (self expression) and I will consider myself better off then I was before. Capitalism is a economic system (a description of our allocation of productive resources) which is characterized by individual (private) ownership of productive resources and decisions about how to use those resources. Global Capitalism just means that this is happening on a global scale. 

So far, so good, but how does a nation of shopkeepers fall into the pocket multinational corporations? The key lies with how society expects government to provide for the nation's citizens. Multi national organizations are the world's most productive organizations. Most agree that a government is in part responsible for providing for the material well being of its citizens. However, large corporations rather than the government create and distribute (sell) the fruits of production. Additionally, those corporations also employ large numbers of people. When people demand higher living standards and jobs (a profitable use of their time) the government by the nature of the system relies on corporations to provide those things. This is not the same as providing people directly with jobs, money, and food! A corporation can grow rich in a system which relies on them. 

The banking crisis provides a glaring example of how reliant modern states are on their corporations. When banks, roughly the plumbing in the house of capitalism, went bust they put all of society at risk. Governments had to bail them out to save the system. In America it is clear that this was done at the expense of ordinary citizens many of whom had huge financial woes not unlike the banks. However, the taxpayer was stuck with the bill and banks got a second chance.

The relationship between a nation and its corporations is so distorted that here in America, we speak of businesses as if they provided a type of social service. They are "the job creators and the engines of the country." State governments fall over themselves offering subsidies to lure businesses to their state. However, businesses only do what they do this in order to create wealth for themselves. The conflation of public and private goods causes a lot of confusion. Creating jobs does not mean creating dignity and purpose for individuals. While businesses are an essential part of our economic system, its goals should not be the same the governments which oversee them.