Inactionable

Once more this Friday night, I was fortunate enough to find a last minute ticket to a sold-out (!) Harvard basketball game when I got a press pass thanks to my friend Kathy.  What luck that I got in because it was a joy to watch the battle between the athleticism of the Harvard squad and the experience of the Big Red.  The Harvard team, hyped throughout the pre-conference season, certainly has the talent and skill to not only own the Ivies in the future, but compete on the bigger stage.  However, at this stage in their development, they have a lot that they can learn from Cornell.  I would say how they play, but it’s more than that.   The thing that makes Cornell the best team the Ivies have had for a couple of years is exactly what makes a company great: culture.  In both settings, it’s the little things that matter the most and it’s those little things that they do so well.  Let me explain.

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The now-classic saying “drinking the Kool-Aid” has come into my life a couple of times in the past couple of weeks, mainly as people discussed the job prospects they have lined up and the cult-like nature that many of the big firms display.  Having worked at McKinsey, I can confirm that it’s a common phrase among early tenure folk as they struggle with their initial skepticism about the all-encompassing way the job can take over your life.  With that said, I thought it might be time to share an interesting story I have about the phrase.

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Fast Company has a fascinating operational management article in their latest issue (http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/143/made-to-stick-the-telltale-brown-mampm.html).  The basic premise that the author looks to explore is how to use data that you have to predict when a system isn’t functioning as it should.

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In business school, we continuously look for ways to expand the market for a particular product while standardizing its production.  After all, many of the best businesses of the past 15 years have been those that are scaleable to the world with minimal marginal costs.  Even beyond obvious examples like the internet’s allowance for proliferation of software, there’s been a push to homogeneity by huge multinational corporations as they can produce more cheaply by taking advantage of the economies of scale that their size affords them (think a Starbucks on every corner).   This is globalization.  It makes things cheaper for consumers and standardizes experiences.  This can be good.  But remember that it also makes it very difficult to build and maintain anything at a local level.  Is it any wonder why so many cities feel manufactured now and seem to have lost some of their character?  How could a ‘mom and pop burger shop’ compete with McDonald’s?  How could ‘Al’s Auto’ compete with Meineke?  Well, like me, there’s people who wish that wasn’t so.  Further, we wish we could take advantage of the benefits of that scale without having the cost of an assembly-line experience.  Enter Root Orange (www.rootorange.com).

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It’s funny how spending a good portion of the week studying cases of businesses shades your perspective and allows you to see much of the world in terms of the entrepreneurial opportunities.  This is especially true when you actually see someone taking advantage of an opportunity that few would notice as existing.  Ironically, the innovative entrepreneur here wasn’t one of my classmates, but rather a homeless guy outside of Gypsy Bar, the club that was home to a huge collection of Harvard grad students last night.  Let me explain.

Today in our Leadership and Corporate Accountability class we studied the fallout after Enron’s collapse in the early ‘naughts’.  Among the most explicit changes was the passing of the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation.  In looking at it, our classmate Emily could not have summed up my thoughts any better, “This is all common sense!”  In response to a fallout, Congress of course felt the need to legislate basic ethics and put in rules as silly as “It’s illegal to shred important papers during a federal investigation.”  What does this say about our society that this is necessary?  It brings to light the fact that we are a rule-based, not a principle-based society.  I maintain that the impact of this is that we open ourselves up to the tyranny of incrementalism and are vulnerable to creating a society that we don’t want to live in.

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Last night I was lucky enough to get a last minute ticket to sold-out Lavietes Field House up in Cambridge (a block from where I live!) to see Harvard battle my Princeton Tigers in men’s basketball.  I hadn’t seen the boys in person for a couple of years so it was especially nice to get an up close seat behind the bench and watch a great (and hard-fought) win.  Personally, it was awesome to see the seniors (freshmen when I finished my career) and shoot the shit with the Princeton basketball community after the game.  A few reflections on the team and the game below.

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We’ve just finished our final class in the seminar and the good news is that I’m glad that I took the course.  With the help of the professor’s final recap, I’ve distilled some of the more interesting topics of the last week into a list of takeaways that are important to keep in mind when considering risky ventures.  There’s good stuff there, but at the end of the day it’s the stories of our guest speakers that will stick with me and solidify why these axioms are true.  Because of that, the first three days of seminar, when we had a fair amount of guests with experiential credibility were great, but the last two days, where we waxed poetically about the theory and studied cases through an academic distance, did not light my fire.  I suppose that’s a good thing to learn in and of itself especially since at one point I had considered academia as a profession.  But I digress.

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I’m currently taking a week-long intensive seminar entitled “Success Through Failure”.  In it, we have leaders from the business world (and of course HBS grads) come in and talk to us about times that they failed and how they used that to springboard to the current success that they have.  There’s a couple themes that have come up repeatedly so thought I’d use this post to share those.

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Thomas Sowell has an editorial in the Washington Times this weekend entitled “Intellectual or pathological?: Brilliant thinkers often make things worse”.   http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jan/06/there-has-probably-never-been-an-era-in-history-wh/ .  To be honest, this is a fascinating concept to me especially given my academic background and then my most recent job in consulting.  In both of these fields, the idea is king and implementation is often left at the wayside or only paid lip service to.  The concept here also has a fair amount of relevance given the most recent discussions that I’ve been a part of here on Inactionable, namely those surrounding John Galt and Obama.

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