In the corporate world, being honest and to the point gets you into trouble. I have been warned this week that I am "too honest". When the partner tells you something you know is not going to happen,I am not supposed to say "that's not going to happen anyway". Instead, I should smile and say "Sure, I'll do my best to achieve that" and come back a week later, confessing that there is a "slight problem" and a "significant risk" that, despite my best efforts, it's not going to happen.
I was quite good at shutting up and smiling in the first year of my job. Somehow now though, such a short time before the MBA starts, it's hard to get going. I'm just myself which is not always good. There is another complication though. Not everybody likes politics. In my case, I should smile and say yes to most people initially, but then there are others even higher up than the partners who like honesty. They will rip your head off as soon as you try to waffle and blabla. They are the ones who like me. So it seems I have to change my approach constantly.
What is tough about this is that I know it's not a problem of my company. It happens everywhere. The higher up you get, the more politics you'll have to deal with. It's going to happen at any job in the future. So I'm seriously considering setting up my own business.
The final application deadline for company MBA scholarships at LBS is approaching and I want to dedicate this weekend to the Deutsche Bank women's scholarship worth £20,000
!! I'm sure I'm not the only one applying for that one, especially since the share of females in the MBA program seems to have jumped to ~30% this year. So my next post will be dedicated to scholarship applications. I hope my honesty doesn't get in the way of writing convincing essays ;-).
A long time ago, internet information and services were for free. I remember a time when permanent e-mail accounts, sending sms, newspaper articles, archives etc. were all for free. Then a few years ago companies realized they weren't making any money and cannibalizing their offline business, and it has been sad for me to watch how little by little access to knowledge has become more and more restricted.
Today I have discovered a great site awash with knowledge though and it has made me remember lots of websites that I used to use for information purposes as a student. Well, here's my list of favourites that I would like to share with you. These organizations and companies deserve praise for sharing their insights with the world. Here's my list of favourites.
MIT OpenCourseWare
This is a site I discovered today including contents, lecture notes, exam papers and assignments from a wide variety of courses offered at MIT. If you click on the Sloan School of Management, you can download lecture notes on investment, macroeconomics, behavioural finance, game theory... you name it. It's a great way to get an overview of the business school curriculum.
Knowledge@Wharton
I have a very bad attitude towards Wharton since they launched their stupid advertising campaign in the Economist a few months ago (the slogan goes something like "There are lots of interesting things to do in Philadelphia - not that you'll have time to do any of them" - sorry guys, I want to have a good time at business school!!!!). But they do have an excellent site discussing relevant issues in finance, management, real estate etc.. The approach is to discuss current business issues and citing faculty opinions about them, it's a good way to know what's going on.
Moving from business to international politics, my favourite sources of information are the International Herald Tribune (since the New York Times charges for access to its articles, it's great its international equivalent grants free access to everyone). For more in-depth analyses of emerging markets and countries in crises, I like browsing the free country reports offered by the International Crisis Group. This is a group I would have loved to join upon graduation, but since paid jobs in the field of political risk analysis are scarce, I ended up working in management consulting.
Finally, though many areas of the site are restricted, there is enough free content offered by The Economist to include it in my list of favourites. I especially enjoy the Business Education section (though I find their ranking of business schools very peculiar). An interesting story in this week's edition is a Guide to Womenomics that I plan to read now, the title looks promising!
By the way, I took the picture above at a visit to Oxford two years ago and I want to use this opportunity to congratulate Rusgirl on her admission to Oxford University!
Happy Easter everyone!
What can I say, it is Thursday night 1am and I worked 17h today, finally going "home" to the hotel now, but next meeting will be at 8am tomorrow, then steering committee at 10am, another meeting at 1pm, and then hopefully around 5 or 6 pm tomorrow I'll finally fly back to Hamburg. What a mess. On days like these I really look forward to being a student again.
Wish every one tight sleep.
I have been hoping for the sterling to go down significantly for years and now it seems it might finally be happening, just in time before the first BIG chunk of tuition fees is due. The strong sterling killed me in my student years in St Andrews (ever tried to get by on a budget of £270 per month in the UK?) and now there is hope it won't hurt me another time!
According to an FT article , a list of bad news about the UK economy is pushing the sterling down:
- a record £10.96bn current account deficit in the fourth quarter of 2005, or 3.6 per cent of gross domestic product
- a decline in mortgage approvals
- US short-term rates rising above the UK's for the first time since January 2001
On the other hand, the German economy seems to be picking up, with Porsche sales rising sharply and business confidence on record highs. The reason I'm following this closely is of course the tuition fees. Over the last month, tuition fees at LBS have fallen from €61,700 to €60,200. I'm strongly hoping for the sterling to fall below the €1.40 mark to push tuition fees down even further. Looking at current currency futures this is very likely.
Obviously, I don't want the UK economy to go down too much since I want to stay in London after the MBA. But still I think the end of the strong sterling is good news for all international students at LBS, alleged to make up 91% of the class.
By now all the R2 admits have received their offers, congratulations!! It's great to see the number of admits jump up! The first thing I did was to check what countries people come from. The class is getting more and more diverse!
Some other interesting statistics
- the current female share among admits is 29%, a great improvement compared to recent years (and decades, obviously)! LBS seems to be approaching US levels. I believe it's thanks to the generous women scholarships offered by LBS and several investment banks!
- Surprisingly enough, the number of admits has only jumped by +88, while there were 140 admits initially in R1. I always thought R2 was the biggest round? What happened? Update: Apparently it took a while to include all admits into the directory. In fact, the number of admits in R2 was around 220 vs. 140 in R1.
- It seems though that about 40 admits from R1 never paid the commitment fee so the number of R1 admits as shown on the portal is down to 100. On the one hand, the yield of 71% in R1 doesn't sound good for LBS. Or is this good? I don't really have a comparison.
Work is crazy at the moment so I don't have much to write much on here, but I look forward to meeting everyone at the admits weekend in May and I'm counting down the days till August 28th!
Last year the head of my company gave a moving speech to all the newly recruited analysts and associates. He wanted to make the point that being analytical and smart won't be enough in the future. He told the story of a team that had been complaining about the client project leader. They said he was inept and slowed down the whole project. They didn't know why he was so uncooperative and unmotivated. He went there to talk to some clients and find out what was going wrong. The response he got from the client employees was that everybody in the house knew that the project leader's child had had an accident and was in intensive care - except the consultants. The point he wanted to make was that we wouldn't get anywhere in this job if we couldn't connect to our clients and show interest and empathy to everybody we worked with. I think it is terrific that he wants to change company culture and make us focus more on personal relationships. On the other hand, I don't see how it is going to work.
If you want to be a management consultant, you need to accept sleeping away from home at least 3 nights per week, usually from Monday to at least Thursday. You are likely to work 14-16h per day and have no private life during the week. The type of people who are least likely to mind this lifestyle are those who suffer the least from lack of contact with friends and family. I am supposed to work when I have the flu, when it's my mother's birthday, I only get to see my cute nephew (see picture) a couple of hours on the weekend and I have to miss my boyfriend .... and then I'm supposed to care if my client's wife has depression or his child is ill? I just think there is an inherent contradiction here. Those people who really care about relationships and friendship cannot be happy in such a job and are likely to leave after a couple of years. I still think people who don't mind being away from family and friends 5 days a week for years are complete freaks. That's why I think consultants who've been in the job for a long time are unlikely to be compassionate about other people's personal problems, as they are insensitive even to their own.
That's why I'm very eager to change jobs post-MBA. I am afraid I might turn into more of a freak if I stay (and if not I'll be unhappy most of the time). Now it's only 3-4 more months of work, which is excellent. I've also started a new project now with much much nicer people than in my last two projects so I'm very happy and know that the weeks will fly by. Soon I will enjoy the admits weekend and then pack my bags and move to London!
In the corporate world, being honest and to the point gets you into trouble. I have been warned this week that I am "too honest". When the partner tells you something you know is not going to happen,I am not supposed to say "that's not going to happen anyway". Instead, I should smile and say "Sure, I'll do my best to achieve that" and come back a week later, confessing that there is a "slight problem" and a "significant risk" that, despite my best efforts, it's not going to happen.
