Our Macro TA, Elective Voting, Study Tour Results, and the Value of a Wharton Degree

An exclusive interview with the behind the scenes Wharton Finance 602 TA (aka as "Mister T") revealed the approach he took for last weekend's mid-term exam: Pain!









Note to Class 33 next year: last weekend's mid-term exams were very painful! Ouch, it still hurts.

Here's some of the adjectives used to descibe the feeling after last weekend's Macro (and Statistics) mid-term exams:
"I am humbled. I studied the old WEMBA exams and thought I would be good to go. I was wrong."
"Paaaain, as in Clubber Lang / Mister T in Rocky III" -Zach
"Sadistic"
"My brain is numb"
"Hammer time"
"If the null is low, the exam must go"

After some amount of discussion from what we heard from Class 31, the best premise I heard is that Abel needed to crank the difficulty index up because Class 31 destroyed last year's mid-term. This year? It was like the 49ers versus the Bears on Sunday: Abel 41, Us 10. He cranked it up two or three notches. And those ten points were in garbage time. Good thing he took out the extra question at the end, or it would have been Abel 55, Us 3. Under/over on the mean is about 50% or so. There were a lot of field goal kickers in our class, which translates into "go for partial credit and hope he's merciful".

After the game, Coach Abel was very upbeat and was willing to talk to the press. Here's what he said:
"As Yogi Berra said when the Yankees lost the World Series, at least nobody died."
"There can theoretically be negative scores but it usually doesn't happen."

We also did two other interesting things this past week: vote for electives (first round to narrow it down to 30), and vote for the International Study Tour for next year.

Voting for Electives
Voting for electives was interesting because Robert published the survey monkey results prior to the voting. My strategy as well as others I talked to was to vote for electives that weren't on the "for sure" list. This could backfire if all of us used this approach, which would result in less of the "for sure" list being in the second round. Here's the list from Robert:

Well, with a 39% response rate, I'm ready to say "good enough". Here are the results (in order of highest weighted score)...

Courses VERY likely to be in the Top 30:

LGST 806 Negotiations

FNCE 728 Corporate Valuation

MKTG 777 Marketing Strategy

FNCE 726 Advanced Corporate Finance

FNCE 717 Financial Derivatives

FNCE 751x Mergers, Acquisitions & Buyouts

MGMT 721 Corporate Development: M&A

FNCE 750 Venture Capital & the Finance of Innovation

FNCE 720 Investment Management

FNCE 804 Venture Capital & Private Equity Management

MKTG 756 Marketing Research

MGMT 782 Strategic Implementation

MKTG 753 New Product Development

MKTG 754 Pricing Policy

OPIM 654 Product Design & Development

FNCE 721 Real Estate Investments

MKTG 771 Models for Marketing Strategy

MGMT 701 Strategic Planning & Control

MGMT 804 Venture Capital & Entrepreneurial Mgmt.

Courses SOMEWHAT likely to be in the Top 30:

MGMT 671 Total Leadership

MGMT 811 Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition

MKTG 751 Sales Force Management

MGMT 801 Entrepreneurship & Venture Initiation

ACCT 742 Problems in Financial Reporting

MKTG 781 Entrepreneurial Marketing

FNCE 738 Funding Investments

HCMG 863 Management & Econ of Pharma & Biotech Industry

MGMT 773 Managing Organizational Change

MGMT 809 Private Equity in Emerging Markets (write-in)

HCMG 849 Financial Management of Health Institutions

MGMT 802 Innovation, Change and Entrepreneurship

REAL 721 Real Estate Finance

FNCE 748 International/Multinational Corporate Finance

LGST 809 Sports Business Management

FNCE 731 International Corporate Finance

INSR 811 Risk & Crisis Management

REAL 891 Real Estate Entrepreneurship

Courses UNLIKELY to be in the Top 30:

ACCT 743 Acctg for Complex Financial Structures

OPIM 653 Mathematical Modeling

MGMT 731 Technology Strategy (write-in)

OPIM 666 Industry Structure & Competitive Strategy

LGST 813 Entrepreneurial Law

MGMT 715 Geopolitics

MGMT 806 Formation & Implementation Entrpnl Ventures

REAL 804 Real Estate Law

OPIM 658 Service Operations Management

OPIM 667 Business Transformation (write-in)

MKTG/OPIM 655 Integrating Marketing and Operations

MGMT/BPUB 784 Managerial Economics & Game Theory

FNCE 890 Global Investment Banking

MKTG 759 Channel Management

REAL 728 Security Analysis

MGMT 625 Corporate Governance

International Study Tour Results
Well, WEMBA Class 32 West is headed to Brazil, which Sandra announced this morning. Tudo Bem! (I need to set the record straight: I was not on the Brazil committee nor did I communicate with them prior to my post on the tour.) Props out to Clifton, who did a fabulous job on the presentation! The word on the street is that WEMBA Class 32 East is headed to China. It would be interesting to allow the two classes to mix participation in the trips, which would allow people interested in one country versus choice of study tour. It would also be most excellent to network with our east counterparts again. There's been some email threads about safety, which I think is a valid concern no matter where we go. The question I gotta ask is: why didn't someone address that issue in the pitches? But being the good statisticians that we are being trained to be, it caused me to go research the crime rates out there. Frank made the correct conclusion about it being more dangerous in the US than in the rest of the world per 1000 people.


Here's Clifton delivering the winning pitch for Brazil. We are headed to Sao Paulo and/or Rio...



Zia and the "China Angels" (Alice, Jenn, and Judy) won the "Best costume" award for their presentation.

The Value of a Wharton Degree
This Friday Class 31 is hosting an alumni panel that will be discussing the value of a Wharton degree. All this elective voting has forced us to start thinking (if we hadn't already) about what we are going to do post-MBA. It should be valuable and interesting to hear the alumni perspective on this subject. Of course it'll be biased toward the very very successful alums, but it'll be good to hear nonetheless.

-Chairman P

Buzz on the International Trip

Buzz on the International Trip
So we are getting the Powerpoint pitches for our international trip locations over dinner this session, which should be interesting. I wanted to pass along the latest buzz in discussions with a few folks in our class: although there's a strong (and well-organized) coalition of India and China International Study Tour supporters in our cohort, there is significant last minute interest in Latin America. Specifically, Brazil!

Why Not India?
India is my last choice by a LARGE margin. Our class is tech-heavy already, which implies that many of us have to travel to India for business anyway. I am already forced to travel to the tech centers of Hyderabad and Bangalore, so why in the world would I want to go there for a study tour? If you ask Ariel how sick he got after his last trip there, there's no way I want to go there unless I have to. Which I do anyway. Sorry to disappoint those of you lobbying for India, but it's a place I do not want to go at all.

Then Why Not China?
China is an interesting place, and it certainly is growing by leaps and bounds. But like India, it's a place that most of us will have to travel to for business anyway. Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong are likely destinations in the not so distant future for me, as the offshoring phenomenon is moving toward China as a place for low-cost offshore talent, assuming they fix the IP issues with doing business there. One positive thing is that the influx of money for the Olympic Games in 2007 will be an interesting thing to observe while we were there. I'm not nearly as opposed to going there as I am to India; it would be okay but not ideal.

The Ideal: Brazil - Rio de Janeiro or Sao Paulo
So here's the case for Brazil. Brazil has 180M people, it's the largest country in Latin America, the 9th largest economy in the world, and it produces 40% of the GDP of Latin America. It's also not a place we'd all have to travel to for business, which to me is great. It's a melting pot of cultures: there are substantial Japanese, Italian, Arab and Lebanese populations in Brazil. Plus, Rio is sooo beautiful. Final reason: the fun factor is off the charts for Brazil!

Travel etiquette in Brazil: link
Types of business in Rio: link

Pics are worth a thousand words, so check it out (I did a search on Flickr):

Shot of Rio at night: link to night view of Rio
Beach, city view, and scenery in Rio: link to Rio pics on Flickr
This beats the Old Ship: link to Rio club

The one thing I don't know is what business contacts Wharton has in Brazil.

Post your comments. I'd love to hear what you think about Brazil...

-Chairman P

Macro Quips and Quotes

Yeah, yeah, there's a macro mid-term coming up next week AND a stats mid-term. Guess I'm getting saturated trying to study statistics and macro at the same time, so I decided to blog. I think that Finance 602, Macroeconomics and the Global Economic Environment, is a great class. Abel adds a sense of humor and fun to his lecture style that I have been enjoying. I also like the last 30 minutes of each class that he spends on a current policy topic, which makes macro relevant. This could be a really boring subject if all he talked about was GDP/GNP, PVLR, Tobin's Q, inflation, and business cycles, but he has managed to make it entertaining and lively. I know not everyone would agree with me given the folks I see napping in the back of the class (and no, I won't expose you despite the many mobile phone pics that have been taken...).

The evidence? Here's some quotes from Abel:

• "I know and you know that when "accounting" is in the title of something it's boring. Poor Lambert, he had to teach a whole term of it."
• "Ken's a good friend of mine. I'll take some opportunities for random shots at micro along the way."
• "I don't think you should do algebra in public."
• "Let's not get into a fishing contest because I can fish better than you."
• "On the final exam, there's this question about Turkey..."
• "Final goods and value added is an abuse of both words for Mc Donald's."
• "The budget curve is the domain of the accountants. The indifference curve is the domain of the psychiatrists."
• "Tau is the greek god of taxes."
• "Obstructed view seating is worth mentioning to the powers that be."
• "There's no quiet way to open a beer."
• "The Social Security Trust Fund is not correct. You definitely don't want to trust them."
• "There are five ways to say that there's a current account surplus. In the Eskimo language, there are 35 ways to say the word "snow"."
• "Poor Mexico...so far from God and so close to the United States."
• "A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose your job."
• "This data is published by the business cycle dating commitee. When Bill Clinton heard about it, he wanted to get on it."

Hope you enjoyed the quotes. Now it's time to get back to studying for stats and macro....

-Chairman P

Midway Through Term 2: Thoughts on Leadership Class

Whoa, I just realized that I am getting behind on blogging our class experience! There is so much going on these days (work, school, family) and it's been hard to keep up the blogging. So I figured that I'd write a bit this morning and upload a few pics before the events from the past few weeks faded from my memory.

Management 652, Foundations of Leadership, is a 0.5 unit class, and we finished up the lectures last weekend. Now we take a final the weekend after the upcoming one. It strikes me that this is definitely an "Extreme MBA", as in Extremely Fast! I can't believe it's over already. I thought that Professor Useem did an excellent job with the course, and I enjoyed it immensely. Here's the stuff we covered last weekend with my editorial comments, to give you a sense of what we do in class:

• Clarifying Objectives - We did a case study on the Parable of the Sadhu, which was about a dying Indian holy man in the most extreme of conditions. There was this 1960s video clip that we watched, which was kind of outdated but really hammered home the context of the case to me. A question to remember that struck me: what would you do if the sadhu had been a well-dressed Western woman?
• Leading in an Era of Change and Uncertainty - We covered a case study on Charles Schwab and Meg Whitman at eBay. The Schwab case was really cool because as soon as Useem put up the slide to start talking about it, our celebrity guest speaker for lunch showed up. The guest speaker? None other than Wharton alum Dave Pottruck, ex-CEO of Schwab and current CEO of Eos Airlines.

Here's a pic of Dave Pottruck addressing the class during lunch.

Click here for the link to Eos, which charges $5000 for a luxury plane ticket from New York to London! They market themselves as a "five star hotel with wings". Useem did the right thing and just chucked the material when Pottruck showed up in class. Who cares about a dusty outdated Harvard Business School case study when you have the real guy standing in class! I thought that Dave was kinda like an NFL football coach, aggressive and hard-nosed. I was thinking about Bill Cowher mixed with Mike Shanahan. I thought he was extra candid when it came to talking about some personal stuff and how your personal life affects your professional life; this caused him to change in order to grow. One of our classmates said, "Pottruck just oozes CEO....but I wouldn't want to work for him, he'd be too tough!"

• Acting Responsibly - There were case studies on Old City Enterprises and on Responsibility Yes, But To Whom? These cases were on ethical issues regarding one's personal reputation and the reputation of the firm.
• Making Rapid and Accurate Decisions - Useem wrote an article about the forest fire disaster on Storm King Mountain in Colorado in summer 1994 that claimed the lives of 14 firefighters. Our exercise in class was to make a decision about whether to race or not given some assumptions on the payoff and risks involved for professional auto-racing. This was pretty fun, as we had to split up into small discussion groups to make a decision, and then to come up with a group consensus across the entire section. Of course, as a faithful moblogger, I captured some pictures of this going on in class with my camera phone. Here's some pictures. There was a pretty funny moment in our section when Amir quipped, "What if the driver was a sadhu?"

WEMBA Section 2 debates whether to race or not. Sean modeled the expected utility of racing on the chalkboard.








Zia convinces Gary, Rob, Amir and Malika to race. "No guts no glory!" Amir was still wondering what if the driver was a sadhu....

• Building Leadership and Teamwork Before Needed - We finished up the class with some scenes from Gettysburg, where we studied the charisma and gravitas (oh no, I used the word, 10 yard penalty for me) behind the events that allowed the Union army to hold its crucial left flank. This was the turning point of the Civil War. Useem said that in the FT program that they actually go visit the site, and it made me wish that we could have done that too.
  

Some other stuff that happened last weekend:

• OPIM 621 Final. We took the OPIM 621 final, which is the other 0.5 unit class that is also done for this term. Hershey cranked up the difficulty level on the final compared to the last few years, but that was sort of expected given the clustered and skewed distribution on the quiz. This is the class that went by the fastest. I thought that learning Linear Programming and simulation techniques were useful tools that I will likely use in the future.
  
• Elective Selection Time. We got some additional info on the elective selection process as well as alumni feedback on their experience at WEMBA West. It is quite interesting right now, as there seems to be a lot of discussion and lobbying going on in the class to garner votes for electives of interest. We need to draw an influence map of the relationships in the class, and then to navigate the major centers of influence. I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
  
• Getting Sick. It sucks being sick, as I was last weekend. I think Raghav will agree with me. Sorry for those of you who had to hear me coughing; hope I didn't infect anyone. Wharton will record classes for you if you are really sick, but I think I made the right choice to go to class as there is no substitute for in class attendance. The good thing is that I got a ton of sleep on Friday night, having turned in about 9pm. Seems like something is going around now, at least in our study group....

-Chairman P

BusinessWeek Article With Quote from Wharton Professor

I'm passing along an interesting read about the YouTube/Google valuation. It had a quote from a Wharton professor inside...

Link: BusinessWeek article: Smart Move or Silly Money 2.0?

Microeconomics: MC = MR

Here's an e-commerce website that is a marketplace for creative types in a ton of different categories. If you liked Smetter's micro class, then you'll love this clock.

Here's a link if you want to buy one to put one up in your office: CafePress

Statistics Quote, for Those Studying STAT 601

"...you never know if what you're doing is correct, but you always know that what you're doing is right..."

-Deborah Rumsey, Statistics for Dummies

Make the Most of Your Internship (or first post-MBA job)

Credit goes to a friend at Kellogg who passed this one along to me...there are some interesting thoughts on the technology sector (Hot Trends) from Kellogg's Technology Marketing guru below. There are also some "Must Reads" with links. The internship comments probably won't be as relevant to most of you.

-Chairman P

How to make the most of your internship (or first post-MBA job)

Interview with Professor Sawhney

By Emma Blaylock & Bergen Moe-Fishman

The summer is approaching fast, so we spent 30 minutes speaking to Professor Sawhney, Kellogg’s Technology Marketing guru, to get his tips on making the most of a Marketing or High-Tech internship.

“How can we get the most out of our internship?”

One thing you need to realize is that if you sit under the tree the apple is not going to fall on your head. You have to be proactive. The best type of internship is where the project is ill-defined and ambiguous – where you have the opportunity to scope and structure it to say “this is what I am interested in and what I can deliver”. Think about it – I am a manager and I’ve written a requisition for an intern and I just want a good person to work for me. They turn up and treat it as gospel and I’ve spent 5 minutes writing it. So don’t be shy in going to your manager even if they present you with a project and say “do you mind if I re-scope this or re-frame this in a way that I think would add more value to the firm and be a better learning experience for me?”

But you can’t do that unless you know the company and the context. So take your time and do your homework. Spend a few days getting the lay of the land and sucking up as much information as you can and then make a counter proposal. If possible, don’t join a running stream where you join in the middle and leave before it finishes and have no sense of closure. It is much better to do a piece of work that you can drive to completion. Which might mean you end up taking on something less ambitious but that you can work on and finish and your contribution can be uniquely identified. Get some sense of ownership over a deliverable or product.

And one final thing is to network, network, network, network. Resolve that you will have lunch with a different person each week or you are going to reach out to people. That’s how you learn and build relationships in particular if you want to work there full-time.

“What should our objective be in an internship?”

For internships where you want to explore an industry and use the internship as a stepping stone for something else, really understand how product management or marketing works inside of a well-known, reputable company—especially if you want to work for a smallish company [after your internship]. For internships where you want to stay with that company, the best thing you can do for yourself is to navigate the landscape and find the appropriate position and manager to work with inside that company. One thing people need to realize as they think about any large company setting is that you don’t work for a company, you work for a manager. Within the same company you can have a disastrous situation or a wonderful situation depending on who you work for and how good they are as mentors. In that setting, make as many connections as possible. Try to get out there and get in front of as many people as possible. Look for projects that give you high visibility that get you exposed to senior managers. Get as much of a birds eye view of the organization and places you could see yourself working in.

What are some of the mistakes that people make on the internships and how can we avoid them?

People sometimes find themselves spinning their wheels quite a bit or they get lost inside of a big company. Don’t just put your hands up – see what else you can do with your time.

And not networking enough – understanding that this is about building relationships just as much as building knowledge. One person once told me a great formula - your value is what you know raised to the power of who you know. So it is not just your knowledge but your knowledge leveraged through your relationships.

What hot trends we should read up on?

Mobility – video becoming mobile, devices becoming mobile, content becoming mobile so we have to translate everything we know about media, advertising, brands, user interface design, search (Google says this is their biggest opportunity) and the way search on devices can now be really local to the mobile environment.

The connected and converged home – (IP TV, content streamed over the internet, Voice Over IP). Convergence and mobility come together – moving music around the house through WiFi. The other thing I’m seeing companies really get better at (e.g. Intel, Microsoft) is beating commoditization through better segmentation. Designing products around end-users and specific scenarios rather than just talking about specific products and price. I talk about it as the emergence of experiences – creating experiences rather than products you just want to push.

Software as a Service – this is the biggest trend in the enterprise world the biggest trend and the new model for Web 2.0 (which has a consumer side and an enterprise side). How Google is going to get into the enterprise is going to be very interesting to watch and how Salesforce.com is changing the model for deploying software and Microsoft’s whole “Live initiative”. The internet becomes the platform. I believe that enterprise applications are dead in the long run – it will all be services. Another thing with enterprise technology is communication and the whole collaboration space which is undergoing a revolution. There is big investment in this area. How we work today with IM will evolve to the next generation working in global, virtual, distributed teams.

Platform Consolidation – There will be just five platform players in this world – Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, SAP, and LAMP (a Linux stack) and everything is going to converge into these platforms. And related to that is network centric innovation – using the power of the network (community) to connect people to product development, innovation and so on.

Modularization – The value chain is fragmenting. So the back-end is getting separated from the front-end, the devices from the infrastructure and everything breaks down into different layers. You have to really think about where you want to play in the value chain.

Remote everything – remote monitoring (RFID, remote sensors), deployment, services. How you can really play with time and space – both are becoming more valuable (Tivo, off-shoring, follow the clock).

Professor Sawhney’s Must-reads

• CNN (what’s current)
• Wall Street Journal
• Business Week
• Fortune Magazine (David Kirkpatrick, in particular)
• Business 2.0 (combination of marketing and technology trends)
• Gizmodo.com (gadgets)
• Amazon.com (to see what’s new in electronics and read product reviews)
• Customer World blog (the world of new media and consumer empowerment)
• Brandchannel.com (for brand management)
• Technorati (which scans other blogs)
• Emergic blog (IT in emerging countries)
• Trendwatch.com (trends)
• Springwise.com (database of 8000 people who spot the hottest trends)- their report this month is “Customer-made” talking about customers are getting involved in the whole marketing process