I was quoted in BusinessWeek. Its sort of a rite of passage, methinks! Long ago, I used to read the B-school blogs and articles on BusinessWeek which got me interested in the B-school concept. Funny, that life should come full-circle this way!
Here is the link to the article. Summer Reading List: The B-School Edition: Looking for a little light reading to while away the hours? These books might be just the ticket, by Francesca Di Meglio
……Business lessons can continue long after the classroom doors are closed for the summer. That's why BusinessWeek asked professors and students at top business schools to share the five books they'd put at the top of their personal summer reading lists. Titles ranged from the classic novel to contemporary nonfiction, but when read together create an encyclopedia of leadership, just the thing to productively while away a summer as the financial crisis continues. A rundown of the most popular picks follows. For the complete list, visit "Summer 2009 Books: MBA Reading List" on the Getting In blog……….
It is 12:01 AM and I just returned home from the bank. I have to admit that even though taking the customary black Mercedes or BMW back home after late nights on the job sounds sexy, often the Jubilee Line is much faster than London traffic. This city never sleeps and its streets are not the grid that MannyHanny is - so it takes way longer driving through the London maze than the quick zip up to the Upper East/West side from mid-town or Wall Street.
IBD has been everything they promised and then some – the 14-15 hour days, the modeling, the powerpoint jockeying (although much less jockeying than I was used to in consulting), and the intern 15 (a la the freshman 15 – I need to get to the gym on the 7th floor). I'm working in Lev Fin, rumors of whose death, as it turns out, were highly exaggerated. I finished a week of training and Deal Maven exercises, while preparing a pitch for a Private Equity firm trying to acquire a French company. And I discovered debt! Equity i.e. stock occupies a much more outsize space in the public psyche than it warrants, thanks to IPOs of yore – so much so that debt, and the beauty of its intricacies are lost in the white noise. Simply said, debt, especially high yield, mezz and leveraged debt is fantastic! And sitting on a call with a PE sponsor makes one feel small, so small. Its beautiful watching how this gargantuan belching pump called Lev Fin, sucks in debt at one end and spits out equity at the other end with a gurgling chuga-chuga-chuga! And covenants – ah covenants, so Biblical and evocative of Aaronic burnt-offerings of heifers and turtle-doves – covenants are so dynamic, and with so many moving parts. The entire picture is an exercise in pointillism, you focus on the details, but then you have to step back to enjoy the whole picture. I could go on and on!
My favorite (and arguably the most famous) pointillist painting)
Seurat's "Sunday on La Grande Jatte". See the original at the Art Institute of Chicago
I've been MIA for a while. Speaking on MIA, if you like her music, check out Santogold. I've been flying under the radar, having spent a fantastic weekend in Boston, organized the London Business School Crossroads Art Exhibition, taken a macroeconomics exams and finished my organizational behavior audit with MyBnk (a non-profit). BTW If you are into pro-bono for non-profits, I highly recommend these articles:
The new landscape for nonprofits. By: Ryan, William P.. Harvard Business Review, Jan/Feb99, Vol. 77 Issue 1, p127-136
Organizational lessons for nonprofits. By: Hauser, Jerry. McKinsey Quarterly, 2003 Special Edition Issue 4, p60-69
The art exhibition (sponsored by my summer sugar-daddy, Nomura) was well-attended and the open-air concerts (violin, viola, harp, flute) performed by students from the Royal Academy of Music were simply mind-blowing. We had rented a grand piano, and it was great to hear the quad fill with notes from Rachmaninoff, quite different from the usual corporate buzz-buzz. Dean Andrew Likierman inaugurated the exhibition. This was the best two months that I've spent organizing an extracurricular event. My role was Veep of Sponsorship, and Senior Veep of Jack-of-all-Tradery and Event-managery. Incidentally, I'm doing the same role for the London Business School Healthcare Club, in preparation for the 2009 Healthcare Conference. GSK chief, Andrew Witty will deliver the keynote.
So you may wonder if I ever study, given all my travels and extracurricular involvement. The simple answer is "No". And does that mean that there is a mad scramble and all-nighters before exams? The answer is "Yes". The truth is that, this is what works best for me. And no matter what your study style in B-school, it is relatively easy to get an A, curve notwithstanding. And then again, with grade non-disclosure, often people don't care enough. I just don't agree with most of what is being taught in my Operations and Strategy classes anyways – it is outdated and impractical in the real world. As for Macroeconomics – spend 2 days quality time with a good text book, read the Economist and read whatever Goldman Sachs and McKinsey's chief economists put out, and you're golden.
McKinsey Managing Director Ian Davis on "What society expects from business"
The B-school experience, coupled with the Macroeconomics class, and McKinsey chief Ian Davis's talk, and a question I was asked in a consulting interview "What reform is needed in the educational system, globally?" (I had to spin tales for 45 minutes) prompted some deep thought which I intend to convert to a white paper at some point. But here are the salient points (below). I'd love to hear your opinion on it (email me at sbuxespresso@gmail.com)
1) Professional degrees must be shortened in order to return high-GDP producing individuals to the workforce ASAP. Case in point, doctors, lawyers, MBAs and PhDs. The advanced professional degree educational system is outdated and programs are too long. A combination of self-study, online courses and modular/block weeks, with a greater emphasis on internship time is what's required. Think of your own MBA experience. Wouldn't you rather be out making the big bucks, ahem!, increasing GDP earlier. And, especially for PhDs and doctors, with the internet, data-mining, rapid technology upgrades and better predictive/computational/hypothesis defining/problem-solving tools, it should be easier to get done in 3 years, no more. People entering these degrees are arguably smarter and better informed today than their peers 20-30 years ago, and we aren't futzing around with Bunsen burners and conceptual quarks and anti-quarks as in years gone by. Besides, not only is there an opportunity cost associated with keeping people out of the workforce, there is actual value-destruction, as people lose motivation towards the latter stage of their advanced degrees. Ask any fifth year Theoretical Physics PhD or third year medical resident about regressing motivation. And, think of this point and the next one, especially in the light of women, child-bearing years and glass ceilings. Wouldn't this actually make things easier, or at least give them the option? Would it? I'm asking.
2) Ditto for four-year colleges. Split the four years into modular elements so that students can intersperse longer internship spells in between to really understand what they want to do vocationally. Imagine a four year program, where freshman year is when you are 18 and senior year ends when you turn 25! I started off as an engineer, then biotech startup researcher/product developer, only to find that I wanted to be a strategy consultant, and now I'm going into investment banking. And I'm not atypical. More than 75% of my MBA classmates are career changers, onto career number three. How many of us started wanting to study choral music only to find that we really wanted to do few years later was law or underwater basket-weaving? In the meanwhile we futzed around in school or meandered from job-to-job. In other words don't put the horse before the cart.
3) Instead of useless subjects, teach people the following early on in their educational experience
How to leverage their brains fully? How to deal with failure? How to find happiness? How to deal with metal pressures? There is a huge body of recent research that suggests that we as humans do not fully understand how and why we think a certain way (nature + nurture). Hence books like 'Stumbling on Happiness' and 'The Paradox of Choice'! After all isn't it about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Our mental and emotional map is still very primitive, and lags behind the pressures and pace of post-post-modern lifestyle. The solutions this new research suggests are not your grandma's Freudian lying-on-your-shrinks-couch bullshit, but solutions grounded real facts based on fool-proof experiments, double-blinds, cross-referenced with MRI/CT scan data. Don't we want everyone to live richer, fuller lives? And bonus - from a capitalistic perspective this understanding helps sell stuff and from a welfare perspective it helps solve problems (Read 'The Tipping Point', 'Freakonomics', 'Supercrunchers', 'Fooled by Randomness' for evidence).
How to interact with people, empathize, connect and collaborate. Friction between humans and the inability to snap together like LEGOs and work cohesively are will be the most significant value-destroyers in upcoming years within any organization. See Ian Davis's view on this. How many times do you wish you had insight into a difficult co-worker's mind? Why should good interpersonal skills only be the forte of salespeople and schmoozers? How much does this affect the potential of people who are unable to overcome their social awkwardness? What, are we living in the stone-age, where lousy interpersonal skills impact both individuals and corporate/citizenry well-being? (Read 'Extraordinary Relationships', 'Fierce Conversations').
How to find the right mate? Even as it is, one could argue that divorce is a welfare value-destroyer. It is as welcome as a root-canal. And it is definitely an economic value destroyer. Think of alimony or child-support as transfer payments (most feminists and child-advocates would love to scourge me for this). And, not being able to understand what a potential partner would want, defers the mating process (not sex, but confluence), potentially reducing individual happiness (not the happiness associated with a stable partnership, but not being able to fully focus on what makes the individual happy regardless of the relationship). And, ask any joint-tax-return-filing married couple. Less tax equals more savings or consumption which equals more growth of national capital stock which equals more GDP and welfare growth.
Teach people how to learn, think and evolve vocationally. This is especially important for developed countries with offshoring and outsourcing. Case in point, Adam Smith vs. theory of comparative advantage. Help people learn to evolve and develop new vocational skills. I have been lucky to have "learned to learn" and to evolve from engineer to researcher to consultant to banker. But this should not be the privilege of a few. Teach the masses to fish…..
Similarly teach people fiscal and personal finance concepts much earlier in life. The reasons are self-evident.
Obviously, none of this can be forced down the citizenry's collective throat, given the personal nature of issues at hand, the issue of free will, and given that no government or educational system should be as totalitarian. I suggest a gentler kinder approach where the people are made aware of what they are missing out on and why this is important. Most rational human beings will see the value in this.
Well, that's enough pontificating for now. I need to get cracking on my Corporate Markets and Finance final. And then on to reading, 'Damodaran on Valuation' in preparation for my Nomura summer internship. More later!
……..Fourth on executives' minds is organizational capability. Talent is only one component of capability. "If talent is not trained or relevant to the task at hand," it won't have an impact, he said. Capability comes in many forms: emotional, psychological and intellectual. Sometimes even physical capability is important in business. "Intellectual can be dominant, but often human capability, like the emotional stability to deal with stress, can, in certain circumstances, be crucial."
In most companies, talent is misdirected close to 70% of the time, according to Davis. Often the mismatch between an employee's capabilities and his or her assignment is most obvious from the CEO's vantage point. One CEO told Davis that his main job -- his definition of strategy -- is matching managers' capabilities to the work that needs to be done.
Davis was asked how companies should balance matching individual capabilities with specific tasks, and still be able to develop management talent when new challenges arise that might be beyond an employee's capabilities. He said it is possible to do if top executives have a clear strategic view of what they need and a sense of the people who could ultimately fill senior leadership roles. Then top management should be prepared to invest in those people and tolerate some mistakes.
Business today, he said, is unwilling to accept any degree of failure, even small mistakes that might help future leaders avoid catastrophes in the long run. "We're in a culture that says, 'If you fail, you're gone.'" He argued that most people learn more from their mistakes than their successes. Often CEOs are fired for a mistake, just as they are becoming strong and wise executives. "It's tragic," said Davis. "My general experience is that if you have highly capable, motivated people in the right place, most other problems go away."
The "Usual Suspects"
How do these themes bear on leadership?
Davis said one word captures what is necessary: diplomacy. He defined diplomacy in the business context as "the ability to influence events through the force of personal and moral character.... I think business, NGOs (non-government organizations) and public sector leaders are all going to have to learn the useful skills of diplomacy to explain in a positive way what they do and why they do it."
……..Davis stressed that the issues he focused on in his speech go beyond the "usual suspects" of CEO concerns -- such as costs, corporate structure, customer relationships and strategy. "These subjects matter a lot, but they're starters. You've got to get them right." Even companies that do get the "usual suspects" right don't necessarily thrive, he said. To differentiate themselves in the future, companies will need to build strategies taking into account the larger themes of society and government.
Half of my MBA 2010 class visited the Agusta Westland plant near Milan for a school-sponsored field trip. The goal of the visit was to diagnose operational issues in the helicopter assembly and upstream sub-assembly manufacturing plants. Luckily for me, Agusta Westland is 90% similar to a previous client from my consulting days, so this was a lot like shooting fish in a barrel. In any event, as far as operations go, three words are all one needs to know - Lean Six Sigma. Everything else is a load of crap, outdated and ineffective. These days most PE firms swear by Lean Six Sigma.
The helicopter plant itself was near Varese, an hour away from Milan. I won't bore you with the details of how Apache and Sea King helicopters are assembled. However, I'll mention the the pizza in Varese, which was awesome – wood-fired oven, thin crust with parma ham, roquette and buffa mozzarella.
After the plant trip, a few of us rented a car and drove first to Bologna, where we had Bologna salami (baloney) and real Bolognese sauce at Osteria di Poeti, the best restaurant in Bologna (near the city center). We then drove to Florence, where we stayed in Oltrarno for the night.
The next day was spent walking around Florence (remember my admit essay on how I would spend a free day?). Of course no visit to Florence is complete without pistacchio gelato from Ponte Vecchio and a visit to the Gallerie dell'Academia to see David. And, we celebrated April 25, Italy's WWII liberation day, with a bunch of cute communist students at a demonstration below the Piazzale Michaelangelo. They treated us to cantucci, a hard almond biscuit (like biscotti) which is eaten after dipping it in vin santo (sweet wine). And they even gave us a large bottle of fantastic homemade wine, promising to let us make it up to them when they next visited London.
We spent the rest of Saturday and Sunday at a castle in Tuscany - Castello di Ripa d'Orcia, on top of a hill near the village of San Quirico d'Orcia, some 25 km from Sienna. The view from the hilltop and the traditional food from the kitchen was glorious, although the wine from the estate left something to be desired. The serenity of the Tuscan evening was broken only by the sounds of our partying late, and the music from another party in the next castle over, on another hill, a few km away. This morning we drove back to Milan, where after a long delay at Malpensa, we made it back to Gatwick, in time to read our corporate finance cases and finish our managerial accounting homework.
A much needed update to my blog. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that I was nominated for Clear Admit's Best of Blogging. Fantastic! A really busy schedule prevents me from waxing literary, so bullet points will have to suffice. What has life brought my way these days?
I'm in love with Japan. I almost applied for exchange to Keio but other conflicts prevented me from making it work. I'll likely take a few block weeks during one of the terms at LBS and then spend a month in Japan.
Leaving for Milan on Thursday for a trip related to my Operations and Technology Management Class. I'm visiting the Agusta Westland Helicopter operations near Milan to do a diagnosis of their assembly plant which should give me an opportunity to apply those Lean Diagnostics skills I used in my previous consulting work. Agusta Westland usually makes the Air Force One helicopters but Obama won't be getting one this year.
Event prep for Crossroads, the LBS Art Exhibition, is going great guns. Tomorrow we take over the quad and install an exhibit. It's a clothes line strung across the quad, hung with colorful bras and boxer shorts and equally colorful resumes, rejection letters and candidates' responses to rejection letters.
I recently visited Saatchi Gallery in London. Their current exhibition "Art from the Middle East" is f@#king awesome, like nothing I've ever seen before.
Several friends from Boston and Sweden visited me in London. That was awesome! Shout out to Keith, Kate and Ariana!
I love Marketing Strategy – it's the most amazing course I've taken so far, and Dan Goldstein, who teaches it, is the best prof I've had so far.
I highly recommend that every rational young adult read "Stumbling Upon Happiness" by Daniel Gilbert. It's a provocative look at why we as adults may or may not find happiness elusive
I highly recommend that you watch 50 Dead Men Walking, IRA, moles, great 80's rock, heart-pounding thrills – the movie has it all. It's Brilliant!
I highly recommend that you iTunes download "They Don't Love You" by Juvelen and "Rive" by Electrified Jet Shamisen Okita (Think Kill Bill, fusion traditional Japanese music and rock, except its driven by an electric Shamisen. Awesome!).
And finally, I just got back from a lecture on leadership at LBS by Ian Davis, ex Global Director of McKinsey. He's one of my heroes! Getting a chance to shake his hand and speak with him one-on-one was just incredible.
More soon. Sayonara!
Why I'm in love with Japan. Cherry Blossoms in Tokyo Midtown.
Cherry Blossoms in Kyoto
Toyota City, Nagoya
Making a mockery of the tea ceremony. Not sure that one dunks the green tea biscuit in the green tea, but what do I know, I'm gaijin!
The fair ladies of London Business School
And you thought the London Tube/Paris Metro was hard to navigate? Try Tokyo
Ugh! I've said it before here but I'll say it again, "Danny Boyle, you should stick to making movies about junkies in Edinburgh! Look mofo, your exploiting India's poverty for titillation to accompany popcorn chomping is not cool. Your connection with India is zilch! In fact the first time you visited the country was to shoot the film. And, did you even watch City of Joy and Cidade de Deus before decided to go slumming?"
I quote from the Financial Times February 23 2009: The film (Slumdog Millionaire) has been sharply criticised as "poverty porn". Well-respected local filmmakers have described the film as titillating western audiences with its portrayal of slum life. Priyadarshan Nair, an India film-maker, complained strongly that the film makes a mockery of India. "It's nothing but a mediocre Bollywood film, which has used references from several Hindi films very smartly," he wrote in the newspaper India Today at the weekend. "India is not Somalia. We are one of the foremost nuclear powers in the world, our satellites are roaming the universe. Our police commissioners' offices don't look like shacks and there are no blind children begging in the streets of Mumbai." Even some who like the movie are unhappy with its title. "Dog is really offensive for us Indians," says Krishna Pujari, a former street child who now organises ethical tours of the slum.
Yeah, no shit Boyle! Your calling an Indian street-child "Slumdog" is like a white person using the N-word. This is not the f**king Raj and we're not your f**king coolies.
indieWIRE flays it as a "A noisy, sub-Dickens update on the romantic tramp's tale. Poverty can be so much fun with M.I.A.'s ubiquitous "Paper Planes" pop-pop and ching-ching throughout. Jamal's success on the TV show makes him a hero to slumdogs everywhere, but he doesn't care about being rich. He just wants to be with Latika. Quite instructive to the billions of poor people in the world foolishly aspiring to subsistence, let alone wealth! Love is all Jamal needs. Love and a lobotomy." Another disection of the structural flaws of this sub-par film is on this blog.
On other fronts, we had a kick-ass Winter Masquerade Ball last weekend and the organization of London Business School Crossroads Art Exhibition is going smoothly. I'm debating whether I should accept a second internship with Accenture's ADP program. Its 7 weeks and ultra-cool! ADP provides strategic advice to nonprofit organizations, foundations and donor organizations operating in the development sector, helping these organizations achieve social and economic development goals. Sample engagements include building supply chain capabilities for a humanitarian aid organization in South Africa and developing an IT industry growth strategy for the government of Guyana. But after 10 weeks of an I-banking internship will this be overkill and am I better off working pro-bono for a local non-profit? Plus I'm planning on moving to Portobello Road before fall trimester starts in October. But I'm so tempted to do this …. plus its for a good cause! Decisions, decisions!!!
This oversubscribed genre of art finally earned my ire today. I was at the Frieze Art Fair, an annual event hosted by Frieze magazine in Regent's Park. It features around 150 contemporary art galleries from all over the world. The organization and variety of modern art is fantastic and I thought the installations below were cool.
But back to my original rant on the dilution of modern art by two subversive genres!
It was OK when Marcel Duchamp took a urinal, stood it on its head and called it art. And, even when Tracey Emin displayed her unmade bed with sweat and blood stained sheets (go figure!), one could say "metaphor for shock and awe", but a new generation of rag-tag, slacker, dumpster-diving artists is taking way too many liberties, and I protest! In the context of a staid art gallery a "found art" installation serves to stimulate and jar one's senses. In moderation, soggy rolls of toilet paper, bits of chicken wire, used bottle-caps and piles of used shoes juxtaposed against a clean-cut context and surrounded by a few post-modern masters is actually cool. But, for the first time today at Frieze, I was confronted en masse by the proliferation of found and trash art - aisles and aisles of it, which would make hobos feel at home.
A few messages for these artists:
Found art is so 1998 and passe
Bondage and kink have ceased to be art forms and are back in the porn genre
Collage is an admirable art form, especially if you are five
"Used Kleenex and Hypodermic Needles" is NOT a mixed medium
Yes, we are aware that we are a post-post-modern wasteful society and materialistic consumption has left us soul-less
The other genre of art that's past its peak is "refrigerator magnet poetry art", akin to when you make stubby sentences on your fridge using a small selection of words printed on magnets. You've probably seen its artistic equivalent at a museum too - typically a large canvas washed with primary or solid colors, with random 'pop'py angst-filled words scrawled on it to form a terrible haiku-like inscription like,
"Paradoxical Rage Flagellation Yerba-Matte
Tea and Sympathy Yellow Submarine Obnoxious Ocean
Latte Kicking Screaming Gucci Little Piggy Die Corporate Bastard!"
Here is an example,
And another, which is arguably a cut-above the rest. It's an assortment of text messages that the artist had received. Enjoy!
I think back to the Fall of 2007 and the B-school app process. I'm elated that I won't ever have to write another B-school essay again. Although, the one essay that I did enjoy writing was NYU Stern's Essay #3. I created a mini-blog and submitted it as my essay. In the interest of filling chronological gaps for my family and friends, I've decided to post it. NYU Essay #3 - Personal Expression: Please describe yourself to your MBA classmates. You may use any method to convey your message (e.g. words, illustrations). Feel free to be creative. If you submit a written essay, it should be 2 pages maximum, double-spaced, 12-point font
If I had maintained a blog for the past three years, these would be some of the entries: January 2005: I am passionate about travel and art. I have discovered a unique dynamic interrelationship between them that lets me explore the world around me and better relate to people. Whenever I am in a new city, I visit its art museums. The art I see, in addition to my travel experiences provides the subject matter and inspiration for the canvases I paint on returning home. I finished my new “masterpiece”(right)! It conveys that as humans, we share a unifying theme and blend into each other seamlessly, even though we may look different.
March 2005: I deconstruct what I see around me and then reassemble it using a vivid palette. (A) is a mosaic of a person’s face, (B) is a butterfly,(D) is a building on the Chicago skyline (‘The Corn Cob’ Marina Towers), (E) is a night-time view of traffic in Bombay’s congested streets and (F) is a tree. My memories of a lighthouse in the fog in Nova Scotia inspired me to paint an abstract representation of this seascape (C). My (ethnically diverse) group of friends came over for wine and cheese and panned my new paintings. The best part was listening to their interpretations. Their differing worldviews affect their experience of art and I discover so much about them by listening to their interpretations.
May 2005: Exciting news! I helped Mark, my client, present results from a four month program we co-led – the program improved his site’s operational performance by over 25%. Our audience (the executive team of his Fortune 300 company) was impressed, and now the CEO wants the program to be replicated across the division.
October 2005: Venice was exciting. My girlfriend and I discovered this fantastic home-made wine sold at little shops all over the city (in used Pepsi bottles). We enjoyed our “to-go wine” as we took in the sights.
December 2005: Business is booming out East. My father is on a whirlwind business trip to N. Africa and the Middle East after which he will ‘stop by’ his Malaysia office before returning home to Bombay. Finished reading ‘Freakanomics" by University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and ‘The World is Flat’ by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. The latter made me think about how the West and East have perceptions of each other that differ so much from reality. A huge gap exists. I renewed my desire to use my multi-cultural lifestyle to bridge this gap.
April 2006: I ran workshops on basic consulting skills for seven new recruits at a company retreat at Cambridge University. We simulated business cases, data analysis and delivering Powerpoint presentations. Visited Stonehenge and St. Paul’s cathedral (London). I have now seen the world’s four largest churches (Rome, Florence, Milan and London).
June 2006: Returned from Bombay! I could barely recognize the city I grew up in and last visited two years ago. Sam R. (one of my mentees) called to inform me of his promotion. He thanked me for the daily coaching I gave him during his first project.
April 2007: I helped my friend, Kathy organize a Forsyth summit, where scientists from Forsyth, Harvard and MIT presented latest research in combating oral and dental conditions to Forsyth donors.
May 2007: My friend Lauren and I participated in Project Bread’s ‘Walk for Hunger’, a 20 mile pledge walk in Boston that raises funds for Massachusetts food pantries and soup kitchens. Sore after five and half hours, we renewed our determination to spend more time at the gym. However, we were glad to have raised money for a worthy cause.
July 2006: Lauren, who works at a US investment bank was having trouble motivating her counterparts in India to meet project deadlines. She turned to me for insight into differences in communication styles, upon which I suggested being more formal when communicating deadlines and expectations to her Indian counterparts than she would with her US colleagues. She used my suggestion and saw a dramatic improvement in their response. I am glad that my dual cultural background helps me explain Indian business culture to my non-Indian friends and vice-versa, a skill which I would bring with me to business school.
July 2007: Love living in downtown Boston! Love my new job! My Friday commute involves an elevator ride down 10 stories, a 30-second walk through a mall and an elevator ride up 23 stories.
August 2007: I was at a presentation to the client CEO (at a multi-billion dollar PC company). Halfway through, he asked for my assessment of the performance of manufacturing operations currently outsourced to China. I had my response prepared. My recommendations will be implemented, saving over $10M for the company.
October 2007: Visited a client site in S. Dakota, which leaves N. Dakota, Alaska and Hawaii as the three states I need to see to have visited all 50. I have seen world-famous buildings like the Guggenheim and The Louvre, but nothing prepared me for this. My client site is an enormous white building surrounded by cornfields and painted with black spots – like a gigantic Jersey cow.
December 2007: I find that talking about what people are interested in is the best way to bond with them. I often go out to lunch and dinner with my clients, giving me opportunities to get to know them personally. I am always pleasantly surprised by what I learn about them – one of my clients is related to Amartya Sen, an economics Nobel Prize winner. He gave me a signed copy of Sen’s book of essays titled ‘The Argumentative Indian’. That makes for three books in my library signed by a Nobel Prize winner.
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