I wanted to wish you all a Merry Christmas! It's a bit late in the posting owing to the fact that I was literally in the wilderness and thereafter in transit from Africa to India, encountering delays and a lost luggage situation which took ages to resolve.
The Kili climb over 6 days was great fun - damp, wet, cold, dusty, tiring fun accompanied by large doses of banter and yuk-it-up! I didn't make it to the summit which was a slight bummer. Summit night (starting midnight) was stymied by a high fever and chills which in addition to Altitude Mountain Sickness (pounding headaches, nosebleeds, projectile vomit) made it a fool's errand to attempt a slope which at many places is a vertical climb with opportunities to go right off the cliff. At that point, its not physical endurance but mental fortitude that counts, and with a fever – this would have been a definite disaster. Like a good B-schooler, I would not have recognized when to call it quits and turn back, and would have kept pushing myself until I made a mistake and at the very least came home in a cast, if not in a casket. So I happily camped out at 4660 meters with others, while a few of my more able LBS colleagues successfully attempted the summit (both Stella Point and Uhuru Peak @ circa 5900 meters). I feel reassured that I could have made the summit (roughly 1300 meters more), the climb being about the same as Ben Nevis which I had successfully climbed in earlier this year.
I won't bore you with the usual story regarding the different terrains one experiences – rainforest, alpine desert etc. and the climes – cold, v. cold, raining, hot, v. hot etc. There are many blogs that tell that story. The only advice I would give potential climbers is a) 10-15% of the route is actually quite dangerous and b) attempt the summit over seven days using the Machame Route. Six days is a killer and the other routes do not allow for acclimatization.
Kili was followed by a safari in Ngorongoro Crater and then in the Seregenti. We stayed in tents, with the local fauna prowling outside, within meters of where we slept. The entire Africa trip was incredible – being so close to nature, being elemental. I've never seen a night sky so filled with stars. And the people we encountered were simply fantastic. Having read Guns, Germs and Steel and then having experienced the continent was a happy serendipity! I have great hope for where Africa is headed.
In the meanwhile, I finished reading "Bad Science" and "Predictably Irrational". I would not recommend the former. Now, I'm on "What got you here won't get you there" (see below, comments left by the author Marshall Goldsmith on my blog post). Its an amazing reckoning of the hard-to-self-diagnose interpersonal behavioural flaws that hold us back in our personal and professional lives. I needed this long-overdue nudge, and am using it to structure my resolutions for 2010. All in all, I'm pretty psyched about 2010, finishing up B-school by mid April and travelling more before starting work full-time in July. I'm looking forward to strengthening new friendships and renewing old ones. And I hope to catch up on a few lingering hobbies – brush up on French, play the two guitars which I bought off my flatmate and of course, hitting the links.
With that I wish you a prosperous 2010! More adventures to come!
"Finding Forrester" is one of my all-time favorite films. I'm intrigued by the hermetic Salinger-esque William Forrester played by Sean Connery, from the tweed coats with elbow patches right down to references to stories published in the New Yorker, Pulitzers and prep schools with Hogwarth-like storied tradition. However, what really did it for me was the urban element and for lack of a better descriptor, the hip-hoppization of the movie, through the character of Jamal Wallace, a kid from the projects, who's got game, all kinds of game, know what I'm saying! I wish I were that cool, but 'nuff said! Anyway, what I is saying is that hip-hop did to this movie, what "Save the Last Dance" did to ballet.
But that is not the subject of this post. And, I'm not saying that I find beauty in the misguided youth and mental anguish of Holden Caulfield, I'm just saying that Salinger is an institution. Today's Slate.com posted about what Salinger himself has been up to for the past few years, since last publishing "Hapworth 16, 1924." in The New Yorker.
By Ron Rosenbaum, Posted Friday, June 5, 2009, at 6:01 PM ET
Do you know about this new J.D. Salinger lawsuit? True: The number of people who lose sleep over Salinger's strange saga may no longer be enormous, but he still has a cult following, and there are also those of us who—without being cultists—think he's an important figure in American literature whose work (and whose subsequent 45-year-long nonpublishing silence) are both worth paying attention to.
And the new suit focuses on the three great Salinger mysteries: 1) Has he been writing? 2) What will become of what he's written after his death? (He doesn't seem inclined to publish anything before then.) And, finally: 3) If it exists, how good is it?
(How do we know he hasn't just been writing "ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY" all this time in his snowbound New Hampshire digs?)
In the suit, the 90-year-old author seeks the "recall and destruction" (subtly oxymoronic?) of a novel that had been set to be published in the United Kingdom this summer and in the U.S. this fall. The book is 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye by a pseudonymous writer who calls himself John David California.
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
I'm reliving the scene from Lost in Translation, where Bill Murray is jet-lagged and up at 3 AM sipping Suntori Time Whisky. Its been less than 24 hours in Japan and I'm already in love with this country. And, this has nothing to do with the fact that I'll be interning for Japan's largest investment bank.
For starters, the flight here was easy and I'm glad I splurged my points on business class. We're staying at the Four Seasons Chinzan-So and the Japanese garden makes reaching Zen-like bliss a walk in the park.
I just love how the people, in general, are incredibly polite and helpful. I mean the concierge and bell-boys at the hotel go as far as walking you to the elevator and pressing the button to your floor before stepping out and then formally bowing as the door closes. And, if thats not enough, they wave their arms in front of sliding doors, just so you do not have to inconvenience yourself by setting off the motion sensors.
The toilet does everything except talk to me. And the subway rides start and stop smoothtly unlike the jerky rides on the Tube that send standing passengers careening into each other. And the landscape is spellbinding -- even "the outdoors" are perfectly manicured, with pine and cypress trees planted in rows on top of perfectly shaped ridges. They do know how to get their feng shui right around here with industrial, commercial and residential buildings all melding seamlessly into each other. Its not jarring, how the city is laid out unlike say NYC - short building, tall building, warehouse or London - brick, stone, brick, stone. The lines flow cleanly from rooftops to flyovers to canals to parks and fountains.
Pocari Sweat, Is it in you?
Why is this person resting her bum on an extremely large tongue?
The language does inject hilarity for the accidental tourist. Starting with swear-words (of course), the biggest dis is to tell someone that their mother has an outie. And the unfortunate use of English at times makes for silly double entendres. For example, the ubiquitious vending machines (1 for every 25 people) sell a sports drink called "Pocari Sweat"! And, I'm so buying a T-shirt with garbled English signage... something that says "Try Touching American Meat Goat - Heavenshow!"
Tomorrow, we're visiting the Toshiba factory, Roppongi and Akihabara for some manga subculture fun. I have Coldplay's "Lovers in Japan" running through my head.... "dreaming of the Osaka sun, dreaming of when the morning comes!" More later! Sayonara!
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