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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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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Thank you, Luke, for the excuse to take a break from cover letters! I’m appalled by Sowell’s piece. I’d be amused by a Stanford Hoover fellow with Harvard degree and a Chicago Economics Ph.D spewing anti-intellectualism if that sort of stuff didn’t tend to get violent and oppressive. Read about the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, Stalin in the USSR or the Islamic Revolution in Iran if you want to know how quickly anti-intellectualism can get out of hand. Here are a few criticisms – I promise to avoid the too-easy ad hominem ones and let Sowell’s alarming hypocrisy slide from here on. Read more…

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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I’m down here in New Orleans with 40-something other HBS students as part of a trip they’ve done for 4 years [at this point in my first draft I had a clause on this sentence that basically said "to aid in the recovery effort"; but honestly, if I were to have come here with no preconceived notions, I'm not entirely convinced I would have needed to qualify it in this way].  We’re here working in volunteer consulting teams with 8 different non-profit organizations that are each involved in the reconstruction and redevelopment of New Orleans.

But, beyond  the “re___” [<-- insert word of choice here] of this town (and by the way, this is a seriously cool and intensely unique city that you should come to see for yourself), I have come across some observations/thoughts/judgments/conclusions that are worth documenting.  Keep in mind that these are only my interpretations of what I have seen in a limited amount of time: Read more…

Steve Myrick, my friend and blog poster, made waves on TED.com this month in his typical understated way.

Here is the link to Steve Jobs’ talk on “How to live before you die”, referenced as ‘one of the best of the web’.  The speech was given at Stanford’s graduation ceremony in 2005.  Enter, Myrick.  Stevie boy was president of the class (no surprise for those who know him) and it was his job to find the speaker.  Despite having numerous hurdles (both internal and external) to getting it done, he made his class’s wish come true and convinced Jobs to speed over to Palo Alto and give this speech.  A high-five of compliment to Steve for making it happen!

http://www.ted.com/talks/steve_jobs_how_to_live_before_you_die.html