Posted 1:38 PM by Zachary (e-mail)
MO 512: Best Class Ever
MO 512: Bargaining and Influence Skills has turned out to be, far and away, the best class of my MBA career. It truly encapsulates the best of Ross' "action based learning" motto: every class the students engage in one or two simulated negotations. Starting out with very basic negotiations (like haggling over a used car price) and moving quickly into complex, cooperative, multi-party negotiations, it's the one class that can either make or ruin the rest of my day.

Some of the things I've learned in the first four weeks of class:
* "Tough negotiator" = "Skilled negotiatior", not "Hardass".
* I have a tendency to try to fill in silences, which can lead to talking away advantages. Silence is an effective negotiating tool.
* Preparation, preparation, preparation. One of the toughest questions during a negotiation is "why?" (ala "where did you get that price?"); the unprepared negotiator can be crushed by that word alone.
* I have a tendency to view negotiations as competitions. Some are, some aren't, and some require a mixture of competition and cooperation.

As in real life, negotiators' reputations are an important component of the class. To prevent a student from freely using outright deceit and lying to win every negotation, at the end of the term all the students are polled to determine everyone's "reputation index".

The text for the class is Fisher & Ury's Getting to Yes, which is reasonably intelligent and readable. It looks like I might even finish it, which will make it the first book I've read cover-to-cover in over a year. I made it to within 50 pages of the end of Hardball: Are You Playing to Play or Playing to Win before I couldn't take it anymore. The tendency of management books to drift into generalities and jargon is very frustrating.

Posted 1:29 PM by Zachary (e-mail)
Blue Skies, Smiling at Me
Unlike the first half of the month, January has ended with a series of steadily warming temperatures (we're now above freezing!?!) and blue skies. See, Michigan winters aren't all bad!

Posted 1:42 PM by Zachary (e-mail)
Starbucks: Fantastic Customer Service
So I walk into one of the Ann Arbor Starbucks locations, and immediately notice all the lights are out. Some sort of blown fuse has left them without power to the lights and registers, but not the coffee machines (or wireless internet). What do they do? They continue serving customers, for free, until the power is restored.

That's the kind of service that makes me a repeat customer, a frequent T-Mobile hotspot user, and [possibly] a new T-Mobile cell phone customer (when my current contract runs out).

Update: The SBUX stock chart says a lot.

Posted 6:51 AM by Zachary (e-mail)
Fresh Tales of Interview Calamities, #3


(other Fresh Tales of Interview Calamities)

Posted 9:03 AM by Zachary (e-mail)
AFLAC: Dominating the Japanese Market?!?
As a grad student, you often come across some weird and interesting facts. For example:

Did you know that AFLAC--that insurance company whose [US] commercials feature that annoying duck that you just want to shoot and serve with kumquats and Grand Marnier--is a giant of the Japanese insurance market? That one in four Japanese households are insured by AFLAC, that 93% of the Tokyo Stock Exchange member firms offer their employees AFLAC products, that AFLAC is second only to IBM in Japanese revenues of non-Japense firms?

Bizarre.

Posted 1:06 PM by Zachary (e-mail)
Fresh Tales of Interview Calamities, #1 and #2
For all those first year MBAs out there heading into internship interviews:

I've begun a series of comics in the Ross School of Business' Monroe Street Journal newspaper meant to relieve first year students' stress over internship interviews. "Fresh Tales of Interview Calamaties" is a series of true* stories that illustrate what not to do in job interviews. The first comic strip:



So, take heart, first year students! Certainly you'll do better than Luther!

* By "true", I mean "fictional".

Update: The MSJ actually published the first two of my cartoons in today's edition, so here you go:

Posted 11:53 AM by Zachary (e-mail)
Financial Times Rankings 2005
Apparently the Financial Times has released its 2005 global MBA rankings; the Ross School of Business has jumped from #30 to #16. I'm not sure how this happened or what it means, but anyway, it sounds nice.

Posted 9:06 AM by Zachary (e-mail)
Winter Trip Scheduling
Stories like this remind me of all the recruiting trips to New York I made last year. I got snowed in twice, which isn't fun when the only clothing you have is a business suit. Anyway, one piece of advice I've tried to give first year students is that, when scheduling recruiting trips in the wintertime, give yourself leeway. If you have an interview in Manhattan at noon, fly in the night before, rather than the morning of, just in case. Better safe than sorry, after all.

Posted 2:52 PM by Zachary (e-mail)
Snow on a Busy Saturday
The Ross School of Business' annual Winter Formal is tonight (the same day as Chicago GSB, apparently). Thankfully, the snow is starting to taper off now--we've only gotten 6" to 8" since last night, which is much lighter (and less fun) than what's going to hit Boston and New York tonight.

Unfortunately, Ann Arbor is doing a lot worse job clearing the streets today than during a weekday. That has added further pressure to what is a busy Saturday for me. I'm in one video skit for the Follies, and the bulk of taping is today and Tuesday. Thankfully, instead of the scheduled four hours of shooting, we were able to wrap it up in less than two hours, mostly because we all had our lines memorized. I'm psyched about this skit, because I have a big role (I'm ###### #####, and the skit is a spoof on ### ###########)*. I'm in one other skits, a live one, but have a much smaller role.

With the shooting behind me, I've just enough time to get home (a slippery 25 minute drive that normally takes 10 minutes), clean up, change into the Tux, and head off to dinner. I skipped the Winter Formal dance last year--like everything else, sacraficed at the altar of internship recruiting. I feel sorry for all the women going to the dance; wearing pumps or sandals when temperatures are in the single digits must be brutal.

* Details of Follies skits are embargoed until after the performances, February 11 and 12.

Posted 11:06 AM by Zachary (e-mail)
Technology Review 2: VoIP with Vonage
As I mentioned last December, a classmate turned me on to Vonage's VoIP (Voice over IP) phone service, and I decided to give it a shot. Anyone with high-speed internet service at home can try out Vonage with no risk; all you need is a [free] adapter and your regular telephones will work with it.

The big question looming over VoIP was the sound quality. After a month of usage, I'd say that VoIP quality is not on par with normal phone service, but it is close. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being "face-to-face sound quality" and 1 being "incomprehensible", I'd put regular phone service at 8, Vonage at 6.5~7, and cell phones at 3.5~4.

A lot of classmates use only cell phones these days, giving up on a home phone. I make enough calls from honme, including international calls, that I feel it's worth having a phone with better sound quality than my cell phone. Since I'll probably save $500~$600 over a year by going with Vonage over the local phone companies, I'll probably stick with it.

Two other cool features of Vonage. Checking for messages is a cinch: in addition to checking them from home, I can hear them by logging into Vonage.com, and I can even have new messages automatically e-mailed to me as .WAV files. Cool. Second, I now have a 646 [NYC] area code phone number, which I will not have to switch when I move.

There are two downsides to Vonage's service. The first is that you cannot use a fax machine on your main Vonage phone number; you need to set up a separate fax number ($9.99 a month). Second, and less important to my situation, is that you need to have all the telphones you use connect to a single adapter unit (which is plugged into your high speed modem). For small apartments that's not a problem: a couple cordless phones will do. For big houses, it would get a trickier.

Dan (HBS) writes about a different VoIP product, Skype, here.

Technology Review 1: FireFox

Posted 5:22 PM by Zachary (e-mail)
Achewood
I stumbled across the online comic Achewood the other day, and in going through the archives found this MBA-related strip. It made me spit my Starbucks.

Posted 9:28 AM by Zachary (e-mail)
THE Week: Deja Vu
The Finance Club held its annual "Mock Interview Super Saturday" event this weekend, with officers (like myself) and other volunteer 2nd years interviewing the 1st years. We held it this past weekend because the Investment Bank on-campus interviews (for summer internships) kick off tomorrow. It's hard to believe that only a year ago I was in their shoes, clammoring for a spot, my future career at stake.

Unlike last year, when the two big S&T recruiters interviewed on the same day, students this year face a slightly more spread schedule: Lehman Brothers on Tuesday, Deutsche Bank on Thursday, and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley the following week.

Acting as the interviewer rather than the interviewee really gives you a good perspective on the whole process. It's damn hard to--in thirty minutes--ask everything you want to ask, listen to the responses, and take notes, at the same time. It's no wonder that most banks will put you through four or five interviews before making an offer (at Ross, the banks usually do second round interviews the day after first rounds, and you find out about the offer that evening). Clarity and focus are the two most important traits for applicants, in my opinion.

Finally, each year I've noticed some students (myself included) falling into the trap of thinking they "deserve" an interview and/or a job offer. Usually, the thinking goes, "I visited bank X 4 times over the fall and met with 12 people; I deserve to be close listed." As a club officer this year, I tried to drive home the point that:

1. A bank's goal is not to give out a prize for hard work, it's to choose the students it thinks will most excel as a trader/salesperson. Internships aren't deserved, they're earned, in the interview rooms. All the work they did over the term was solely to get a closed list interview slot; and now the slate is wiped clean, and all applicants are equal.

2. Nobody knows a particular bank's culture better than its current employees; if they think you wouldn't be a good fit, personality-wise, it's probably a good thing not to intern there. From hearing classmates' experiences at other banks, there are some I'm very glad I didn't get offers from, because I had a great time at [my summer internship].

I've truly enjoyed my six months as VP for Sales & Trading with the Finance Club. It's been a fair amount of work, broken roughly into thirds: preparing for the Wall Street Forum, counseling MBA1s, and doing presentations on finance topics (option pricing, fixed income markets, etc.) Another chapter of my MBA experience is now coming to a close.

Posted 9:25 AM by Zachary (e-mail)
In All Fairness
...it was sunny over the weekend. God apparently took me up on my offer: in exchange for the blue skies, we got temperatures down in the teens and single digits.

I'll take it.

Posted 5:32 PM by Zachary (e-mail)
Photo-Blogging: January Gray

Posted 9:53 PM by Zachary (e-mail)
Theatre!
One of the activities that will be eating up some of my time over the next four weeks is the Follies show. Similar to other business schools, every year the students put on a show of humorous skits, songs, and videos about MBA life.

Acting auditions took place right before the winter break, and this week the directors have let us know what roles we've landed. I've ended up in one skit and one video, with one minor role and one huge role, so I'm pretty happy.

Posted 9:45 PM by Zachary (e-mail)
Dropping Classes
It didn't take long for me to start tinkering with my schedule. I've decided not to take FIN 631 and 632, the two banking-related finance classes. Nothing against those subject, which looked interesting. I'd just prefer to put more effort into the other four courses.

Posted 9:21 PM by Zachary (e-mail)
Ann Arbor is Still Waiting
...for the first sunny day of the year. Snow, wind, subzero temperatures, I don't mind. The lack of sunshine is another story.

Posted 5:57 PM by Zachary (e-mail)
Technology Review 1: FireFox
What's "FireFox", you ask? It's a free web browser, brought to you Mozilla, that offers some nice benefits over Internet Explorer. I first heard about it last November, when a classmate did a presentation about it (in LHC 561, Management Presentations). By temperment I am not a "Microsoft hater", and cast a wary eye on the whole "open source" movement to fight the "evil empire".

But then I noticed that FireFox was taking marketshare away from IE, at least based on the site traffic of this weblog and others I frequent. On some days, FireFox was garnering as much as 20% of their traffic. So, being open minded, I gave it a try.

Here's a quick list of the benefits of FireFox:
1. Tabbed Browsing: If you're like me, and usually have 5, 6, 7+ browser windows open, FireFox's tabbed browsing is a huge timesaver:

2. Page Loading: FireFox seems to load pages faster. If there's a slow section of a website, it displays the other pieces first, then fills in the laggards. Pages do load noticeably faster than IE.
3. Security. FireFox doesn't suffer from the security holes of IE. To be fair, I haven't had too many problems with IE in this area, because I've got Norton Antivirus running on my machine.
4. Features. FireFox has all the features of the latest IE--including popup blocker and password saver.
5. Installation Ease. It literally took less than five minutes to install the application, and unlike most Microsoft products, it did not require a reboot. FireFox automatically copies in your bookmarks from IE.

However, there are some flaws. Most prominently, FireFox seems to be unable to handle the login forms of certain websites. I'll type my login and password to, say, eBay, and after clicking "Submit", FireFox will sit for a few minutes and then report back that the page returned was blank. So while FireFox is my primary browser now, I haven't uninstalled IE (if that's even possible), and still use it 20% of the time.

Posted 3:08 PM by Zachary (e-mail)
Winter 2005 Schedule
With the sole exception of an hour time conflict between Derivatives and Business Japanese II in the second 7 weeks, this schedule is a thing of beauty.



From March on, Mondays and Wednesdays are free for continuing my golf lessons and (finally!) getting out onto some courses. Sweet.

Posted 2:42 PM by Zachary (e-mail)
The Downside of Ross
In the spirit of sharing both the good points and bad points of business school, I must say that Michigan's less-than-two-weeks (Dec. 23 to Jan. 5) winter break is ridiculously short. It's not the business school's fault--Ross actually gives us a break with classes not starting until today--since we've got to stay in synch with the rest of the University.

I don't know the exact reason for the stingy winter break, but I would guess that it boils down to money. Like many other schools, UM is based on a two term system for students, Fall (Sept. - Dec.) and Winter (Jan. - April). The big difference is that, to generate more revenues, I'm sure, UM has two summer terms, in May - August, instead of one. Uncool.

MIT has the right idea: if you're only going to have two terms for students, give them January off. MBA1s could concentrate fully on recruiting/interviewing. MBA2s with jobs could spend the month away from Michigan (nothing happens here in January, besides snow). It would be win-win.

Posted 12:00 AM by Zachary (e-mail)
Happy New Year!
Best wishes for a happy and healthy 2005!