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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Small is Beautiful (Economics as if people mattered)

I don’t remember who suggested me to read “Small is beautiful“, but the second title “Economics as if people mattered” gained my attention.  E.F. Schumacher, an ecomist who worked also for the British National Coal Board, wrote this book in the early 70s and I believe he would be disappointed by seeing that what he has written is still very actual.

SIB discuss about the foundations of the modern economics (growth, production, greed, …) and how its activites have gone beyond human scale, resulting in issues as pollution, resource explotation, unemployment and others. The author’s opinions regarding these aspects is made clear by his quotes: “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not for every man’s greed” (Gandhi) and “What where luxuries for our fathers have become necessities for us”.

The fourth chapter “Buddhist Economics“, is my favourite. This theory, developed by Schumacher during his job as economic advisor in Burma, supports not only a sober lifestyle, but dignify the work as a necessity of life, to express human skills and creativity.  Consequently he is against all the tecnologies which make human work “meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking” (remember the Charlot’s movie “Modern Times”?).

This viewpoint finds application in the book when the argument of poverty is faced; technology should serve people at a human scale, allowing

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the poors to improve their conditions by giving them tools. This is not accomplished by the developed countries that spend money in capital intensive activities in developing countries which have, instead, a lot of labour to employ. From this idea stems the concept of “intermediate

technology“, the development of tools cheap, simple, easy to produce and mantain for developing countries. This technology is “gentle” and not revolutionary (or shocking) as, for instance, the introduction of a cutting edge production plant. With “intermediate tools” individuals are able to be immediately productive, while in the case of a capital intensive plant the change would only involve a small subset of highly trained workers (leading to an even more marked divide between rich and poors).

These themes are those that, in my opinion, are more powerful. The other chapters, which treat different topics as the book is a collection of essay, are less effective.  My suggestion is: go straight for Buddhist Economics and Intermediate Technology.

P.S. I just accepted the MIT Sloan offer! How many days until August 28th?

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adMITted!

So we are… after one year of tests, meetings, chats with alumni I received the admission offer by MIT Sloan! Thanks to everyone who helped, advised, recommended or just listened to my single-topic discourses for the last year!

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Even though I haven’t realized it completely (MBA, 2 years in Boston and so on) I can’t wait to attend to the adMIT weekend at the end of february.

I’ll keep you updated!

PS. I started in this post to use Zemanta, a content support for blogging, mail writing, … take a look!