I was a gorgeous day today yet I was stuck indoors doing my tax return for 2004. Thankfully, I am now done with my tax return but the bad news is that I owe the government money. Argghh...

I did sneak out to MIT and played volleyball with a bunch of Sloanies. It was possibly the best volleyball game so far this semester. I have been hanging out the MBA students, whom I found them to be energetic and sociable, quite a lot this weekend. 

4/10/2005 11:14:32 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [13]

Personal

I have just received an email from our running team captain that MIT finished second overall as a team in the BC MBA 5k Race and won ourselves a case of beer. Nice!

4/10/2005 1:22:40 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [15]

Sports

I think I have discovered the best recipe for a good sleep. The running and the beer drinking at a Harpoon Brewey sponsored after-party coupled wtih days of stressful school work set the conditions up for the perfect sleep. I have never slept so well after return home from the running race on Saturday.

Feeling rejuvenated, I went to Hanri's apartment and hung out with her. We reviewed my 50k financials with her and found a couple of areas where I need to correct or correct. I always knew Hanri's auditing skills would come handy someday. Thanks Hanri.

4/10/2005 1:16:30 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [15]

Personal

Instead of sleeping in as I would every Saturday, I woke up at 7:15am to prepare myself for the BC MBA 5k Run. The race was fun as I get the chance to really hang out with the MBA students at Sloan.

The race started at about 10:30am. I didn't complete the race in the time that I had wanted. The uphill stretch at the end of the race had drastically slowed my pace. I finished the race in 23:10 minutes (finished 119th out of 419 runners). While MIT was not in the top 5 teams, team MIT Sloan managed to finish better than the mean. Well done Team MIT Sloan.

I overheard this while listening to a conversation between a Sloanie and a MBA student from another school. "You guys, did the Cranberry case study in your Operations class too? What do you think of the operations optimization exercise for this case?" asked an MIT Sloan student, the other MBA student responded by saying: "What system optimization, we don't do the numbers."

4/9/2005 4:31:43 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [16]

Sports

I never supported the "revolt of ERBA" and do not wish to start another whine-fest on Technology Strategy. I am also glad that the Strategy class has introduced some critical concepts in corporate strategy that every management students ought to know. While Porter's 5 forces of competition, Barney's VRIO, or Hamel's Business Concept are well-established methodologies in realm of corporate strategy analysis, they are by no means the only methodologies available. I think any write-up would need to consider other options of assessing the viability of a company's strategy. My main disappointment for this class is the fixation on just 3 methodologies. But with a condensed class-duration and the limitation of 1,000 words in each write-up, maybe there is a reason for restricting to just 3 methodologies. I know that I am waffling on this, but the point I am trying to make is, what is the best strategy to implement in order to do well for the write-up's? I believe I know my material, the problem is how to express or show to the professor and TA that I do. I'll think more about this later. It's getting late now and I need to go to bed soon as I have to wake up early tomorrow for a running race.

4/9/2005 1:11:07 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [20]

School

I had wanted to post my thoughts on Peter Senge's workshop on leadership which he delivered at a SDM event last week but I was simply too busy to do it. Fortunately, I have just found a very good summary of Senge's talk on Robbie's blog. Check it out.

4/8/2005 10:00:52 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [13]

Business

Analyzing Harvard Business School cases reminds me of my English literature course that I took during my undergraduate days. In both cases, one has to dissect the story the apart to extract pertinent information in order to grasp the theme. The difference between the two is the terminology used. Literal analysis looks at an author's use of ambiguity, connotation, symbolism, or conflicts to determine emotions or theme in a given passage. Similarly, in HBS case studies, one needs to pick up on the underlying theme of the case and then synthesize a conclusion for it. However, the framework for the analysis can be quite different. I have found that with strategy or decision-making related cases, they often need to be evaluated with established performance metrics, competitive advantage sustainability, strategy coherence, competition, and resource availability.

I am fully aware of the approach but I still didn't score well for my first case study assignment for my Technology Strategy class. While I have eloquently described on my paper the basis of my analysis upon the conclusion of the case was drawn, I have failed to capture the essence of the case using the framework that we are required to use. So it's a slap to the hand that failed to follow instructions. Next time, I think I will stick with the more conventional (or acceptable) framework for analyzing the cases. Because as far as I am concerned, Porter's, Barney's, and Hamel's principles trumps over unconventional views.

4/8/2005 9:30:44 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [17]

School

I was one of the fortunate ones in my SDM cohort to be pre-selected for an open-discussion session with a director from the National University of Singapore who is working on establishing a program similar to SDM in Singapore. As the meeting proceeded, the students and the director started exchanging business cards. When communicating with business people from Asia, it is respectful and polite to conduct the exchange of business cards in the proper manner. Unfortunately, I didn't handle the business card ceremony quite the right way.

To my credit, I did manage to hand my business card with two hands and to receive his card with two hands. Nonetheless, I still got it wrong at the end. Here's what I should have done:

1. The younger or more junior person should always present his/her business card to the other party with 2 HANDS.
2. The other person receive it with 2 hands. He/she then present his/her business card to you, in which you must now receive it with, again, 2 HANDS.
3. Now take a look at the business card to, at least, catch the person's name.
4. If it is a sit-down meeting, leave the all the cards that you have received on the table so that you can look at their names and titles. Do not put them away until the meeting is over.

Well, that's the Asian way of handing/receiving business card. Thanks to Kevin for reminding. Of course, there are times when you shouldn't present your business cards with 2 hands, especially in a more causal corporate environment like America. I am interested in hearing other people's thoughts on exchanging business cards in a different cultural environment.

4/7/2005 5:13:22 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [15]

Business

I have just started a new half-semester class called Technology Strategy recently. As I submitted my analyses of the first 2 cases that were due yesterday, I pondered the following. Faculty members and students at management school observe, analyze, and synthesize the processes and strategies of successful or failed enterprises. Grand models were formalized to explain how the processes were observed in the business world while ground-breaking techniques were devised for achieving corporate goals. But the real managers whom we are studying may not had attended business school at all. Take for instance Bill Gates of Microsoft, he seem to have a good grasp of business. His company, Microsoft, seems to be ran in ways that support the precepts of good strategy, as it is defined in our Strategy class. Yet Gates didn't even complete college, let alone attended business school. Was he a genius or are some of the class material just plain or some derivative of common sense? In either case, I strongly believe that while we can write grandiose analyses of our cases, ultimately it is practice and our actual implementation that will get the corporation to where it wants to go.

4/7/2005 11:04:20 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [12]

Thoughts

Why haven't I been blogging lately? Because I am so friggin' busy, that's why. I got school, work part-time, participate actively in school activities, engage in social events, and training for the triathlon (which BTW is not going well at all). I feel so burned out these days and getting 4 hours of sleep a night doesn't help to alleviate the situation. Worse, I still have my tax return that I need to do. If I am going to complete my tax return by this weekend, I really need to get a head start on next week's assignments. So I am going to try to finish one of the assignments that due next week by tomorrow night. I guess my first break from all this madness won't be till Friday night.

Enough of ranting... I was quite relieved, at the same time sad that ESD.762 - System Optimization has come to end yesterday. But seriously, I really like System Optimization. First of all, the material that I learned from the class actually has real-life applications in a broad range of disciplines ranging finance to system engineering. Second, professor Simchi-Levi is just a great lecturer. Every now and then, he would pause and engage the students to express their thoughts on the subject. This is perhaps deliberate as it actively stimulates students' interests and their abilities to derive their own conclusions to the subject. Ultimately, the experience truly enhances the learning, which is why so many students love his class. I definitely recommend this class or any class by professor Simchi-Levi to anyone.

4/6/2005 1:48:27 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [15]

School

I use UNIX quite a lot but my retention rate of UNIX commands is less than desirable so I have created a new category called "UNIX Shell" on my blog to help me remember some of the *NIX (UNIX, Linux, etc) scripts and commands that I have found useful.

First tip on this category is the xargs command that used in UNIX shell to break a data stream into small enough for commands to process. Let's suppose you want to search for MP3 files that you have added to your music library folder in the past week and copy them to another foler, you can issue this command:

find . -name '*.mp3' -mtime -7 -print | xargs -i -t cp {} /tmp

4/4/2005 4:36:38 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [22]

Computers

The past week was unbelievably hectic. I was practically buried (6 feet underground) with school work and activities. The bad news is that it looks like it is going to be like this for another week. :-( The good news is that I am finally done with the financial projections that I am responsible for in my 50k team. I never knew how time consuming forecasting financials for a start-up can be. Practically spent Friday night, and all day on Saturday and Sunday on the financials.

4/4/2005 10:44:00 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [17]

School

The MIT team, despite having a budget of $10,000 and graduate students from Mechanical Engineering, Ocean Engineering, and Computer Science, lost out to a bunch of students from Carl Hayden High School in an Underwater Robotics competition. There are times when thinking outside the box still rules.

3/30/2005 11:10:06 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Comments [14]

School

More rant from a former patient guy. This time, it's Product Design & Development or PDD. It is difficult to stay attentive to today's team presentation in PDD when 4 out of 5 presenters were rambling on and on about their product development process in a monotonous voice.

When you are making a presentation, what are you trying to achieve? You are presenting your ideas to the audience and so that they will stay interested. This means that the presenter is selling to the audience. If so, why are people still speaking in monotonous tone and reading from the slides? Also, the presentation slide is not a written documentation, so keep the content on the slide terse. If you need to explain the context, do it verbally. No slide should contain more than 50 words!!! Last but not least, always present the presentation within the allocated time slot.

3/29/2005 11:17:34 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Comments [16]

Rants

I am usually a very patient person but I was about to pull all my hairs off at Professor Katz's class this afternoon when certain individual relentlessly kept interrupting the professor. I simply find it rude, disruptive, and counter-productive when someone starts babbling away without even raising one's hand. I know you have a lot of experience to share with the class but other people, especially the professor, have their opinions as well.

3/28/2005 6:26:29 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Comments [12]

Rants

Wow!!! What a busy weekend it had been. I have a ton of problem sets and papers due next week at school. I still haven't started working on the marketing paper and the financial projection for my 50k competition.

But all work no play, makes Sam a dull boy. I took a break from study and went to Yoav's bachelor party at Boston Billiard Club on Saturday. It was a tamer than I had previously thought, but it was still fun to hang out. The poker game at Yoav's house was actually more fun than the billiards games. I caught a glimpse of the Illinois vs Arizona NCAA basketball at the Billiard club and I was disappointed that Arizona lost because sloppy ball handling, which consequently turned the ball over to Illinois twice in the last crucial minute.

It was a gorgeous day today. Yes, for the first time, it is finally starting to feel like spring in Boston. So I celebrated the coming of spring by running and swimming to prepare my triathlon this summer. My swimming strokes are in better form now than they were 2 weeks ago. I still find my breathing a little out of sync, which prevented me from swimming long distance efficiently.

Eimear organized an Easter dinner on Sunday night, which turned out to be a successful event. The usual suspects, Camille, Milt, Hanri, Fanny, Angela, and Alan (new guy) were there for dinner.I pretty tired after the Easter meal, but there's no rest for me yet. There's still a lot of school work that I need to do. I will probably stay up till 3am, which is typical.

3/27/2005 11:59:06 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Comments [14]

Personal