With all of that said, the programs could be so much better! The feature that seems like the biggest missed opportunity is SmartArt in PowerPoint. If you’ve never used that feature before, basically it’s a little menu that will help you make the nice graphics that make bullet points so much easier to digest. The problem is there are only 88 that come by default. After 2 years in school, I had pretty much exhausted all of the good ones.  For people who make presentations as part of their full time jobs, I imagine they got sick of them within months.

But there is an easy way to fix this. If they had included a way for a person to build their own SmartArt and then share it with others, then we could all design our own, or for the less image-inclined, browse a site with thousands of them. Open source or creatives commons licenses lead to free exchange and lets users “remix” to customize their experience.  Who would have thought that PowerPoint had a potential social media angle, albeit an unexploited one?

However, MS is so controlled with their products that they don’t have the imagination do this.  I’m not an MS hater, but I wish they would take more chances on their products in favour of openness. I think in this case we’d all be better served.

5) Cheerleading! – Even after midnight when we had no clue what was going on, my team could rely on me to assure them that they could do it, and they always did.

4) Refocusing conversation when it goes off topic ( but sometimes talking over good ideas) – I can be very focused on the end goal, which is awesome when you know how to get there, but can kill the good ideas that come from wandering conversation. A total trade-off, I’m aware.

3) Talking really fast during the wrap up portion of a presentation ( which is invariably over time) – Hey, I’m a fast talker and I get to the point. Naturally I should be at the end.

2) Organizing the work and dividing up tasks – Once a project manager, always a project manager

And number one….

1) Making slides pretty! – “Line up your text! Stop mixing fonts! Add a picture! Use a graphic!”

Yes, you can see how truly invaluable I was.

p.s. this was a test post of the WordPress app on my iPhone.  Hence the unnecessary picture.

Although this could affect my future prospects as employment goes, I do see a bright side. Suddenly, all around me, are tangible applications of all the topics I’m learning in school.  Not only do profs analyze developments in the classroom, but when I hear journalists do analysis, I know enough to understand the deeper implications, and not just take the writer’s word for it.

Case in point: Check out the 60 minutes podcast episode called “oil”.  The whole piece is about the oil market and the price of oil being more about greed and speculation than actual supply and demand.

And, just the other day, Roger Martin, dean of the school, was talking to us about the stock market being about “expectations” rather than about actual predictions of success.

It’s all about convergence.

In total, 9 out of our 40 person class entered – which is a pretty awesome turn out considering we all work full time.

My 4-person team picked up the case at the very last minute because of our work commitments and spent from 7pm to 12am Thursday and Friday at school brainstorming and doing our hasty analysis.  Going into the competition I was worried that because we hadn’t completed all of the year one course work we’d be at a disadvantage to the full-timers who had also entered (not to mention the extra time they would have what with not having jobs – slackers!).  But I was surprised at the number of techniques we had picked up in our courses that helped us zero in on critical information.

We were editing our presentation down to the wire but all in all we felt pretty good about what we delivered.  As it turned out, only one member of the morning MBA class moved on to the finals (along with her team of evening MBAers).  Apparently they took a day off work to work on their presentation, so I guess they were more committed than we were.

The most valuable part of the competition, however, was the direct feedback from the judges (consultants out in the real world).  That, and the chance to hand them my business card.

The worst part?  Not the late nights, not the lack of sleep, not the complete and utter destruction of my diet.  No, it was that I had to wear a suit.  Ew.  It almost makes me rethink the whole thing.

It’s been a year now since I started the MBA and there a few interesting nuggets of info I can safely share without compromising the secrets of the cult of capitalism.

> You probably already know this, but it’s good to remember that it’s important to use specific and exact language when describing things.  Too often lazy words like “quality” and “competitive” make their way into the things we write.  Throw them away and say what you mean.

> Day trading is for suckers.  Some quick math:

Say you buy a stock, paying $19.99 to make the trade at E*Trade. You spend $2000 to buy 100 stocks at $20.  You’re out $2019.99.  Later the stock goes up 5%, woo hoo!  You sell the stock for 2100, but it costs you 19.99, so you’re left with 60.02.  Pretty good right?  Sure, except that’s taxed as income. Taxes take off 25%, so you really have a profit of 35.02.

So what happened to your 5% profit? 35.02/2000 = 1.75%  Seriously, that barely beats inflation.  Put it in a mutual fund, it’ll do better.  Better yet, buy and hold.

> Most people who are pissed off about something just want to be listened to, so stop offering advice and just listen.  The occaisional “gee, sounds like you’re pretty frustrated” is all they need to hear to know that you’re listening.

There’s more, so much more, but I hope it’s apparent that there has been lots of learning and I’m looking forward to the next 2 years.

So far I have some predictable things. For example, the notions of “reciprocity” and “trust” were both very important in the first 2 courses I took.

Another strong theme was resisting the “zero sum bias”; this is where you assume that if you gain, the other side loses. This is not always true so we should strive to make sure everybody wins. The idea, so far, has been to”expand the pie” so that either both manager and employee get more, or both sides in a negotiation get more. It’s a powerful concept that I’ll definitely take to heart.

The final concept that I’ve taken note of is the “confirmation bias.” We were told that as we’ll be studying a lot of real world examples, it’s important not to find out what happened in these cases, because once we know the outcome, all of our analysis will just serve to reinforce what we think is true.

Then, on the very last day, something funny happened. We were all quietly reading something over when someone’s cell phone went off. The professor who had been warning us about the confirmation bias all week turned to the class and said “It always happens when everyone’s quiet.” ……Do you get the irony here? Even though this professor is obviously sensitive to making informed judgements, the minute we’re out of the academic context, he says something that shows this bias in real life. Cell phones go off all the time, but when people are quiet we just notice it more. If you think that cell phones only go off when people are quiet then that will be confirmed, because that’s the only time it’ll be distracting enough for you to note it.

Now, for sure, he was just being a nice guy and playing it down so the guy who’s phone it was wouldn’t be embarrassed. However, I still found it a funny illustration of the huge gulf between what we were doing in the class room and the likelihood that we would ever really apply it.