SIP?

The week after the first midterms you’d like better spend your time celebrating and going out rather than attending classes. In this scenario SIP is a good option.

SIP (Sloan Innovation Period) is a week where you attend to ad-hoc classes (or better, seminars) on various topics, ranging from Introduction to Strategy to Leadership Style (…). Even more interesting, if you bid wisely for your classes you can arrange your schedule so to get everything done in two days and then leave for a long weekend!

Here I’ll briefly comment the classes I’ve taken. Most of them looked like pitches to attract students in their spring course and this can be useful to start making up your mind about next semester.

1. Introduction to Strategic Management
   This class provides some fundamentals of strategy, especially useful for those preparing for the consulting interviews. Structure was good, few frameworks provided but used extensively on real world cases. Nice pick.
2. IT Savvy: Implementing Business Strategy with IT
   As for Introduction to Strategic Management, also IT Savvy was kind of a repetition for me. In fact I’ve encountered most of the issues presented there when working in Booz&Co.; however this is a good overview of the related spring class.
3. The Competitive Edge – What You Must Know About the Physics of Business Processes
   This class is about Operations. First hour and half we played with a simulation of manufacturing company (very like the Beer Game I’ve cited few posts ago) and then we commented the results in terms of plant sizing, order management and lead time of production. Also we looked at some process redesign projects carried out by the Operations group. This was really a good session and I’m looking forward to the class.
4. Leadership Presence: Communication Skills for a Lifetime
   Even though this class sounds fluffy it’s my favorite. Completely unrelated to spring classes, this 3-hour seminar is about communication/storytelling techniques for managers, taught from a former actor now part of the Ariel Group, specialized in communication trainings.

Unfortunately the week passed quickly and now other midterms are approaching… looking forward to IAP now!

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On start-ups and MBAs

During past week I attended to a speech of Aaron Patzer, founder and CEO of Mint. Mint is a personal finance web application started by Aaron 3 years ago and recently sold to Intuit for $170M (!!!).

The presentation however wasn’t a self-celebratory speech rather than a frank peek on what means starting a company from scratch. For Aaron meant:

1. Failures – Before Mint he started 3 companies without success;
2. Experience – He worked in a tech startup to get the necessary experience;
3. Risks – He left the job to work full time on his idea, isolating for months to code the prototype;
4. Persistence – He had to pitch tens of VCs before being funded.

You know the rest of the story but what really surprised me was Aaron insight on how VCs value start-up companies in the early stage (garage level).

• +$500K for an engineer, which can produce a prototype
• -$250K for a business guy, not really needed at this stage (the founder can cover this role part time)

That’s annoying. After getting into a BSchool you’re tempted to think it’s just a matter of choosing what job you like next. It’s not really the case. In particular startups need people that can get “their hands dirty” by working concretely on the product. Conversely VCs (very hyped in this period) look for people with in depth industry knowledge, that can concretely add value beyond the finance, marketing and operations concepts, now almost commodities.

On my side I’m very interested in startups and this fall I will consult one (guess what, marketing plan) as part of club activity at Sloan. Hopefully this experience will help me in developing that kind of applied knowledge necessary to bring value into a company!

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Social IT outsourcing

In spite of the core classes, draining most of day (and night) time, I’d like continue sharing the most interesting events going on here at Sloan. On the last day of orientation, September 11th, I assisted to the speech of Jeremy Hockenstein, Sloan alumni, former consultant but, most important, founder of Digital Divide Data.

DDD is a company based in Cambodia and Laos that provides IT outsourcing services as, for instance, data entry and digitalization. To provide these services DDD relies on Cambodian and Laotian people, especially on disadvantaged youth. Selected candidates are given IT and English lessons and after 3-8 months they start effectively working in DDD. Also during work, employees continue to attend school and after 3-4 years they graduate, now able to get a qualified job in the market, and they leave their spot to another candidate.

DDD now is a company of more than 500 people and has trained more than one thousand since its foundation in 2001. Its 2008 revenues surpassed 2 mm$ and now the company is standardizing the operations among the 3 offices to improve its profitability. At this regard, Jeremy talked about how the company is now focusing more on sales and less on donations in order to build a business sustainable in the long run. On top of this is worth noticing that DDD has ambitious expansion plans for existing offices (up to 1500 people in next years) and for going outside Laos and Cambodia through a social franchising model.

I consider this balance between social and business goals very interesting and critical for many companies with similar missions and I’m curious to see how DDD will evolve in the coming years.

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Getting to the core

First 3 weeks here at Sloan have been intense; I was expecting an easy schedule until core classes started (September 8th) but I was quite wrong. Since my first day I had to run here and there to settle in, attend orientations and (mostly) keep up with the pace of Sloan’s happy hours/dinners/clubbing nights.

1st week (August 17-21)
My 1st week was basically a furious signing up: bank account, loan, international/computing/medical orientation sessions, t-pass… plus some of the (many!) social events organized by other Sloanies.

1st weekend (August 22-23)
The 1st weekend wasn’t less engaging; in fact I participated to the Rafting trek, 2 days spent in the wild in Maine, rafting and kayaking with other 80 (!!!) classmates. Camping conditions were somewhat basic and the rainy weather made me sleep twice in a row in a tent with a nice pond. Nonetheless it was fun, great chance to get to know classmates, and the cook was very good: the lobster dinner in the island in the middle of Kennebec river was worth of the travel.

2nd week (August 24-28)
2nd week was the pre-term one, we had review sessions of math, finance, accounting and microeconomics. The admit portal says that these sessions are not meant to replace individual summer study. Don’t trust it. These classes start really from the basics and I’ve been told also that there’s is a significant overlap with core topics. Classes were useful for me but not all of them were worth of the money (…) even if were surely helpful in getting in touch again with the student’s lifestyle.

2nd weekend (August 29-30)
Sailing! Thanks to the organization of my classmate Jeff plus all the sailing club, a lot of sloanies and SOs got their 1st sailing class at the MIT Sailing Pavillion. Staff was very clear in its briefing, producing also a memorable quote about how to not lose control during sailing in difficult situations: “You have to be the change you wish to see in the boat!”

3rd week (August 31 – September 3)
You could think that medical/computing/internationals orientations were more than enough before starting with classes; actually there is a whole orientation week dedicated to dive deep into Sloan spirit.
Firstly, this week I’ve found out my ocean (Mediterranean) and core team (Gannets), which are your class for the 1st semester (60-70 people) and your study group (6-7 people). Then we went to the Warren center, a location outside Boston used for team-building activities as group climbing, raft building, …
I have to say that I’m not into this fluffy reflection/feeling sharing stuff, nonetheless activities were fun and some of them useful for bounding with teammates.

The week closed really well, with a talk of Jeremy Hockenstein, CEO of Digital Divide Data, and the Beer Game (despite the name no beer involved though), directed by John Sterman, insightful professor of System Dinamics at Sloan. Hopefully I’ll talk more about these last 2 activities in future ad-posts!
3rd weekend (September 4 – 7)
I’ve spent this long weekend before the beginning of the madness in NYC, enjoying my little free time left, trying not to think about readings due for next week!

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What better way to know a place… (2)

This time the morning run was in NY Central Park!

Old habits…

The magnificent 3!

After 3 years I’m back in the US and is nice that some things don’t change. The first time I went to the grocery for the first purchases (those for the survival!) I’ve found the pillars of my previous stay:

• 1 gallon of skimmed milk (added with vitamins!)
• baby carrots (peeled, ready to be eaten!)
• the tuna “chicken of the sea” (really!)

I really need to move on and update my grocery list; I can hear Massi saying: “You forgot the Red Baron“!

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What better way to know a place…

… than a morning run?

Below is how I spent my first hours in Cambridge; beautifully leveraging my need for run, my complete ignorance of the area and a convenient jet lag!

Stata Center - Cambridge

Memorial Drive - Cambridge

Cambridge riverside

I have to add that (incredibly humid weather aside) riverside running is really something. I wonder if I’ll continue running outdoor at least until the river is not frozen!

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The Black Swan

Black Swans swimming in Reading, UK

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s (the author of “The Black Swan“) writing style is very provocative, brash and presumptuous, however the argument he presents about “Black Swans“, very unlikely events with deep consequences, is one of the most brilliant I’ve read so far.

Beyond all his attacks to “empty suits” (experts and consultants of a certain field), Nobel prizes and “fawning MBA students” (hem hem…), Taleb clearly shows our limits in understanding the causes which triggered an event and our poor skills in forecasting. Very interesting at this regard are his examples about how we are biased in explaining past events (narrative fallacy) and how we systematically consider evidences backing our theories but ignore facts which disprove our beliefs (we often forget that 1000 evidences don’t prove a theory but just 1 counter-evidence is enough to disprove it).

The first 2 parts of the book are a sad enumeration of how poor is our critical thought and how we always underestimate our ignorance (great the example of Umberto Eco’s anti-library) yet these parts are very useful in highlighting how we tend to commit the turkey’s error (the farmer has fed me for the last 100o days and so I’m sure he will do again tomorrow).

The last part deals instead with what we can do when facing risks and having to take decisions; most of this section is labeled “optional” by the author but I believe is a necessary read as well. Having demolished (convincingly) the Bell’s curve as a universal tool for risk evaluation, Taleb talks about Power Law distributions, with interesting overlaps with Chris Anderson’s Long Tail and Mandelbrot’s Geometry.

A book absolutely brilliant, which teaches that what we don’t know is as important as what we do know, regardless the field: financial risks’ evaluation, historical events, everyday events…

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Taste of India

Eager to show my enlarged cooking portfolio, I experimented my newly learned indian recipes on my girlfriend and a friend. Here’s the result (not bad at all being the first try).

Indian dinner!

Here’s also a list of what we prepared, linked to some well explained recipes:

• Chapati (no need for ghee, just go with flour, water and salt!)
• Curd (actually we haven’t prepared that one, I bought at the grocery dairy product most similar to it I could find!)
• Green cucumber salad
• Paneer (see ‘Curd’ note)
• Paneer Bhurj (simply the best)
• Lentils (I haven’t found a recipe on the internet but I learnt it at Ruchi, we used Paneer Bhurj base of onions, tomatoes and spices with lentils in place of paneer)
• Rice (just plain rice)
• Tandoori Chicken (we had a few setbacks in the preparation and we hadn’t properly followed the recipe)

A few notes on this trial:

• Don’t worry if you don’t have all the spices required; in my experience chilly and cumin are the fundamental ones to obtain the taste of India!
• We had a fresh white wine with the food, I don’t really know if it’s proper or not, I’ve never had alcoholic beverages while in India
• I believe this are mostly north indian recipes, there’s is a universe of different dishes extending more into meat and also into fish; check the websites I’ve reported for the previous recipes to see more of them.

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God delusion

Image via Wikipedia

I stumbled in this book while in India, I’m not really into religion related books but I’ve heard about Richard Dawkins for his better known “The Selfish Gene” (which I haven’t read yet) and so I gave it a try.

Dawkins is an atheist who tries, in this book, to confute both existence of God (or Gods, depending on the religion) and the usefulness of religion as a moral standpoint. The topic is huge and delicate and Dawkins does nothing to smooth his neat position against religion; since I already shared most of the author’s thoughts this approach didn’t bother me but I figure that most of believing people reading this book would likely be irritated by that.

That said I think the arguments are compelling; for example, when dealing with the origin of life, the author opposes the evolutionary explanation (ever more complicated beings built upon previous ones) to intelligent design (complex beings created from scratch by an even more complex supernatural one, creating though an explanation loop). There is also a section in which the moral value of religion is taken into account and Dawkins analyze both Bible’s Old and New Testment; the author’s writing style describing some of Bible’s episodes is simply hilarious!

One of the last chapters is also dedicated to religion’s role in children education (worrying the examples Dawkins cites about creationists schools) and its influence in the perspective of this young “believers” (the book in fact states that there are no muslim/catholic/jewish children, there are only children son of muslim/catholic /jewish parents).

To sum up I consider it a well written book raising several, well supported issues, even though Dawkin’s style will be hardly digested by the most religious readers (assuming there will be!).

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