MBA Related Podcast Mini Review

This period of Term 4 is very very nice - the first three week break since, well, New Years Day! We are all enjoying the midpoint break in the WEMBA schedule. A lot of us took some time off for Fourth of July to take vacations, a novel concept for the WEMBA burdened student. Studying time has dwindled to 1/3 of the pace earlier this term. I am not sure if it's the pass / no pass option or just plain senioritis. Anyway, on to my post...

For the iPod and iPhone enabled, this post is a review of MBA and business related podcasts. Most of us Wharton-ites are already aware of the most excellent podcasts available on Knowledge@Wharton, which can be found here:
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/podcastcurrent.xml

So esteemed Wharton aside, here's my ratings of some other podcasts I've found out there on MBA and business related websites. These are great if you travel for business or have a long commute like I do.

5 Star Rating

Chicago GSB:
http://feeds.chicagogsb.edu/gsbpodcast
My take: U of Chicago has an array of content rivaling Wharton. Some interesting interviews and content, especially the tribute to Friedman and the podcast on Infosys' rise to a $2B company. Gotta ask Deepak on this one.

iInnovate:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/iinnovatecast
My take: Stanford students feature 15 minute interviews with entrepreneurs, VCs, and innovators. I liked the interviews with Geoffrey Moore, Carly Fiorina, and Andy Grove.

Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders:
http://edcorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.html
My take: Stanford again shows its Sand Hill Road strength through some great content sponsored by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. I listened to podcasts interviewing Mark Jung (IGN), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), and Tien Tzuo (Salesforce.com).

MBA Podcasts: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/audio_video/podcasts/mba/ My take: I really liked the "Private equity - The new kings of capitalism" podcast.

4 Star Rating

BusinessWeek:
http://www.businessweek.com/search/podcasts/cover_stories.rss
My take: Good way to keep up on B-Week without having to read it. "Children of the Web" and "The Real Cost of Outsourcing" were interesting podcasts.

ESPN Radio Daily Podcast: http://sports.espn.go.com/espnradio/podcast/feeds/itunes/podCast
My take: The best of ESPN radio for the sports junkie. Great if you can't catch SportsCenter. I don't like the ads though. Doesn't ESPN make enough off TV?


3 Star Rating

McKinsey on Finance:
http://ksmediaserver.net/ftp/Podcasting/MoF.xml
My take: There's some interesting content but it is basically a reading of McKinsey's print content. It isn't the most exciting listening, but there are some interesting articles, including: "Preempting a hostile takeover" and "A quiet revolution in China's captial markets". Good for a late night cure of insomnia.

Not Rated

MIT Sloan School of Management Podcast:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/mitsloanpodcast
Not yet evaluated.

Venture Voice:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/vv
Not yet evaluated.

Venture Cast:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/venturecast
Not yet evaluated.

MBA Podcaster:
http://www.mbapodcaster.com/Podcasts.asp
Admissions and major related info. Not yet evaluated.

If anyone else has podcast links to share, please post them in your comments.

This WSJ.com article gave me some flashbacks to what some people have been saying for a while now:

Market's Jitters Stir Some Fears For Buyout Boom

If you take a look at the graph halfway down the page, the sheer magnitude of the present day buyout deals was what was surprising to me when you compare them to junk bond deals of the late 1980s. For those of you in WEMBA Class 32, I had a flashback to Prof. Percival's finance class last term when he was talking about this exact issue, as well as to a Knowledge at Wharton podcast on the same subject.

We're living through an interesting time while studying finance at the most sophisticated b-school in the world, and it will be interesting to see what happens to the buyout boom over the next few months. I also saw that recently IPO'd Blackstone just fell 2.7% yesterday to $29.92, below it's IPO price of $31/share. Let's see if KKR continues down the initial public offering path. Prof. Tyson must be working his retailer over, assuming he got it in writing as usual.

BTW, here's a link for the Knowledge at Wharton podcast channel in iTunes:
itpc://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/podcastcurrent.xml

Customized Portfolio Tools are Improving

I just got a call from a UBS PWM VP soliciting my money yesterday who turned out to be a Wharton grad. I kindly thanked her and said no thanks, I manage my own portfolio and asset allocation myself. It's getting easier and easier to self manage your own portfolio using free tools on the internet. It used to be that the tools were pretty simple and not very useful, but that has started to change during the last few years. I have even started to see asset classes such as private equity and hedge funds listed in your asset allocation tools.

Just found this ETF website out there from a WSJ.com article on Better Ways to Measure Your Portfolio:

http://www.indexuniverse.com

The website has some good content for those of you looking for articles on index ETF funds to match to your asset allocations. There's also even a good hedge fund overview article towards the bottom of the first page. I used the search engine to look at some REIT data, which was great to look at after looking at our Real Estate Finance course that started last weekend. I haven't had a chance to look at the free x-ray tool at Morningstar.com or on Yahoo Finance, but if anyone has an opinion, please post it.

Is Pass No Pass Academic Hazard?

Recently, WEMBA implemented a P/NP policy for elective courses in the 2nd year. Is this a Good Thing or not? The way it works is that up to 1 cu per term can be taken P/F. I was thinking about it and I think the spirit of the policy is a good thing overall. It allows us some additional flexibility in choosing electives or courses that we may have an interest in but may not choose to take for a grade. It also reduces competitiveness, which is also a good thing, as I think WEMBA is too grade focused with the switch to letter grades. However, you just have to be honest with yourself and not make it an academic hazard. The problem is that anything north of a D- is still a pass, which incents you to do the bare minimum if you choose this option. This potential academic hazard is doing yourself a disservice, akin to the moral hazard problem involved with insurance/risk management or certain types of executive compensation.

Some things to keep in mind are if you need the courses for a major. Some majors do not allow P/F units to count toward the major, such as finance.

Some advice for Class 33 and beyond:

• Starting in Term 4, there are two main sections, The Finance Section and The Marketing Section. I was one of those who was on the fence and sat in the beginning parts of both classes this term. I ended up in The Finance Section, which made me far worse off from a work perspective but better off (IMHO) from a learning perspective. Leading up to last week's International Finance midterm, I wasn't so sure if I made the right choice. But it was pretty fair so I am overall glad that I have taken the course, which has taught me a lot. If you like Abel's Macroeconomics class, you will like Bodnar's class.
• When you vote for your electives, make sure you get the requirements for majors and keep them in mind. We could have used them for our voting process, and I assert that we would have chosen different classes if we knew that.
• Keep in mind that the class pairings are what is key for the electives. It's still a great mystery of how they do it, but my guess is that they use Prof Bodnar's international finance concept of "you get screwed" when they run the LP. The optimization constraints must be to balance the number of students in each class, so that the most popular classes get paired against each other.
• Take a close look at the difficulty ratings and professor ratings for the classes offered. They will help you choose wisely.

Internet Biz Content Rocks

Diffusion of innovations theory gives us an idea about the how, why and at what rate the spread of technology diffuses through a culture. Here's a link: link. I consider myself somewhere in between innovator and early adopter, depending on the technology we are talking about.

Recently, I've found that I have started to heavily use some internet business content that previously was purely old school-based. For example, I'm using the web more and more to get information faster, and I have started using my iPod beyond just listening to Wharton lectures and Knowledge@Wharton podcasts. It's all about getting the right information at the right time. For example, I now use the Wall Street Journal online edition more than the print version. I end up reading it online first now! I also now have quite a large collection of RSS feeds loaded into IE and Firefox, and I have since cancelled my newspaper print edition. I do still read the headlines for the online versions, BTW. Another example: I found some Stanford Technology Ventures talks on iPod U that were quite good on entrepreneurship. Tien Tzuo from Salesforce.com has a very interesting talk recorded on SaaS, and there are a ton of others from some well-known VCs and CEOs in the Silicon Valley out there. The topics range from paths to entrepreneurial success, a startup panel, and software development in Silicon Valley. Quite good stuff! Saves me from having to go attend these conferences and seminars on my own time, and instead listen to them in my car during my commute.

Recently, I've been recording my Wharton lectures on a USB enabled voice recorder and then converting the WMA files to MP3 format for listening on the iPod as well. Listening at 1.5x speed enables one to more efficiently listen to the lectures. Plus you can rewind key parts to make sure that you really get the point.

So why is this important? Well, for one, the world is going electronic and there is no longer a need to print stuff out. Those of us that figured out how to use the Ikon scanner to PDF in the fifth floor copier at Wharton West now have the PDF versions of all the bulk packs. It sure beats lugging all that paper on the airplane, plus you can search. Suggestion to Wharton Reprographics: it sure would be nice (and it would save trees) if we just got the PDF versions of the bulk packs....

Boom Time for MBAs

(Forwarded from Ambal...thanks):

It's a great time to be an business school student, especially if you want to get into finance. According to the Financial Times, this year is the most competitive since dot.com bubble popped. The main source of activity seems to be private equity firms and hedge funds. Boutique-like investment firms and real estate companies have also become more active; in addition to the investment banks. The number of recruiters has risen. And they're paying more to attract talent. So we're seeing more students get multiple offers.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18909425/

My take:
I'm wondering if it's better to be off-cycle or on-cycle for business careers. There's a strong trend toward PE these days, which means a glut of talent going into the field for the big $$$ that are flowing in. But that's not necessarily a good thing. Remember when investment banking, consulting, .com startups, and VC were all the hot flavors of the day?

Early Thoughts on WEMBA Branded Career Treks

From what I can remember from our marketing classes last term, branding is very important. It's certainly important for the WEMBA program.

Now my head is full of international corporate finance and business law that I can barely remember the 5 C's and the 4 P's. And with the recent discussions about the idea of Wharton West career treks still fresh in my mind, I have recently embarked on having a number of discussions in my own personal network here in Silicon Valley to validate some hypotheses.

Here are some of my early takeaways:

• Premium brand potential is there. There is great potential for establishing a differentiated WEMBA brand identity (aka brand extension) separate from the FT brand. WEMBA would be a premium brand offering with domain expertise as the differentiator. In other words, what most of us are doing now and have done in the past matters.
• Brand awareness is low. The very idea of getting a WEMBA resume book seemed to have good traction, but that is a truly novel idea. We'd need to do some work here.
• Small treks are better. The idea of small informal gatherings like breakfasts or lunches seems to be a good one, especially if there is an influential executive that agrees to meet. I think we'd call them something different. It's not a trek; it's about executive networking.
• The network matters. Getting to the firms and people within them differs greatly from the FT trek approach. The focus would be executives that would meet future/current executives. We need to figure out how to leverage our own networks to arrange a WEMBA branded set of treks.

Here's some snippets of conversation over lunch with a partner in a VC/PE firm here in San Francisco (I have paraphased our conversation and kept the identities anonymous):

Q: Is there a separate market for experienced Wharton West grads of the MBA Program for Executives at your firm? These are people with 8-20 years of experience in their respective roles and industries.
A: I hadn't thought of it that way, but yes, there definitely is a market for those students that have great operational experience in some domain that want to move into a firm like ours. Understand that the pure play PE firms typically want deal experience found in the investment banks, and that pure VC firms want operational experience. We look for some of both.

We were looking through resume books from the top 5 B-schools last year specifically looking for resumes with specific operational experience combined with an elite B-school, but the people we were looking for were really hard to find. If there are great people that are already at the top / executive level of their disciplines, then we want to talk to them.

Q: What level would the people come in at?
A: That's a really hard one to answer, because it will vary from firm to firm. What you want to do is to identify those firms that are willing to hire from the outside at the VP, principal, or even partner level at a firm like ours. It really depends.

Q: Would you be willing to conduct a career trek session with WEMBA students only?
A: Yes, definitely. It would have to be small though, and certainly informal. I think a breakfast or lunch with about 8 people max would be a great format. You don't want them to get too big.

Hope this is useful.......

-Chairman P

Wharton Club of Northern California is Open to WEMBA Students

I'm passing along this offer to join the WCNC from Sajjad Jaffer, VP of Membership at the Wharton Club of Northern California. Note that the link to signup indicates that you must be a graduate of WEMBA, but that is not correct. All current WEMBA students are eligible to join the WCNC now:

It's been a fantastic year at the Wharton Club of Northern California, and we're on track to at least match last year's record 70+ high quality events! With the accelerated engagement of our alumni, volunteers, and Club leaders, the WCNC continues to be one of the world's largest and most active business alumni associations worldwide.

The Offer of the Wharton Club of Northern California
The Club offers Wharton alumni an unparalleled opportunity to extend their global leadership experiences as Wharton graduates. To learn by exchanging ideas and views with Bay Area and Northern California business headline makers. To build relationships with the best and the brightest business leaders who are proud to be Wharton alumni and alumnae. To open business doors for the next generation of Wharton's legendary business talent. To meet people that you will be happy to call friends. To connect with old friends from Wharton. And most importantly, to have fun while learning and sharing our collective intellectual capital and experiences. This is the offer of the Wharton Club of Northern California.

Upcoming events include:
- Happy Hours and Networking Luncheons and Dinners
- a talk by Google Vice President Marissa Mayer
- Wharton Club Day at AT&T Park (our annual SF Giants Tour/Talk/Picnic/Game Day!)
- Conference call with Wharton Marketing Professor Eric Bradlow
- Two-hour tour of Angel Island that will have us riding Segways all around the Perimeter Trail
- An insider's tour of a Silicon Valley icon--'Inside IDEO: Design and Innovation Strategies for Business Leaders'
- and more events to be announced in the coming days!

Here's a link to join:
http://www.whartonclub.com/memsub.html

Elective Selction Suggestion: Golf: For Business & Life

As those of us here in the Silicon Valley know well, it's rare to find fellow golfers even at the highest levels of technology corporations. However, golf is alive and well! I was reading the WSJ online and discovered this article:


A program called "Golf: For Business & Life," sponsored by the PGA of America, underwrites classes at colleges and universities on using golf as a business tool, sometimes for credit. Some 59 schools offered clases (<- look, the WSJ had a typo!) last year, including Stanford and the University of Texas, up from 15 in 2000. Jeff Maynor, a PGA professional who teaches the course at the University of Maryland, focuses on the things you can learn about others -- and yourself -- on the course. Meticulously arranging every detail of a round in advance, from water in the cart to logoed balls, shows thoroughness, he says. Approaching the first tee with confidence rather than offering excuses for a bad back or not having played much recently is a sign of character.

Full article:
Business golf changes course

So the next time we vote on electives, please keep this class in mind for a write-in vote. (Not that we have any choice as the equivalent of being non-voting minority shareholders in a small private corporation, for those of you who are in legal studies this term.) Some of us were saying that we sure would like to have a bit of full disclosure around the LP constraints for the elective pairings. Whatever the alorithm, it seems to come up with non-optimal pairings of courses.

Is the PGA, Calaway or Nike hiring WEMBA grads?

Venture Capital and Open Source

As some of you know, I've joined the professional open source world recently. I thought I'd share this interesting post with you on the number of open source VC investments:

http://lmaugustin.typepad.com/lma/2007/05/open_source_ven.html