Today's FAMA class was unusually boring. Worse, I was feeling sleepy from last night's burning of the midnight oil on the Supply Chain/Operations case study. As a remedy to my drowsy problem, I usually distract myself from the class by surfing the web. But today, I didn't end up bidding on Ebay or playing on-line poker. Instead, I had quite a productive time finishing up our final System Engineering reading quiz during lecture. Indeed, time well spent listening to lecture and finishing homework.

8/1/2005 7:16:40 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [2]

School

I went back to my old place to clear the weeds that have been growing at the front of my condo so that the front will look nice for the coming open house. Before long, my old neighbor came by to where I was weeding and started instructing where I should weed. She then made a remark that her perennial plant that was growing at that spot in the garden is now gone and that someone must have stolen it. She then alluded that other neightbors may have come and stole the plant. I always avoid communicating with my old neighbor as much as possible but I felt compelled to come back with a strong and logical rebuttal to her statement. And I said: "Why would someone come and steal your plant that is firmly planted on the ground?" She tried to refute my response, but each time I gave that logical, unwavering, and stern sounding rebuttal: "Why would someone come and steal your plant that is firmly planted on the ground?" She finally gave up and went back to her house. At last, some peace and quiet. In the back of my mind, somehow I am not surprised if I was once an unsuspected victim of such pejorative remark.

8/1/2005 7:06:04 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

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Rants

My favorite place to go for a Sunday brunch has always been S & S Deli in Inman Square, Cambridge. But today, I found another place in South End call Metropolis Cafe that is worthy of excellent Sunday Brunch. Like the ever evolving South-End, Metropolis Cafe is hip and eclectic. The place also looks clean and well decorated. The only setback is the confined space in the restaurant, about 30 seats in a room a size of 2 ordinary living rooms (about 500 sq ft, I think). Eimear and I both tried the Monte Cristo, a meal consisted french toast, ham, pear, and cranberry chutney. It was awesome. The chutney was well prepared and go went well with the rest of the food. Overall, it wasn't too sweet as I would expect but we were disappointed that we couldn't taste the pear in the dish. Nevertheless, I am definitely coming back to this restaurant to explore its dinner menu in a not-so-distant future. For today's experience, I give this restaurant a 8.5 out of 10.

7/31/2005 9:24:02 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [3]

Food

I received an email from Sonny, a fellow classmate, on Friday about a class call Innovation Teams (or better known as i-Teams in Sloan). Sonny praised that it is one of the best classes that he have taken. According to the course website, i-Teams is described as follows:

I-Teams (2.937, 10.807, and 15.371) is looking for entrepreneurial graduate students to bring innovation to the marketplace. Apply now to participate in this course this Fall! When you join an i-Team, you and other highly qualified graduate students spend a semester collaborating with MIT research labs and mentors from the business community. You work as part of a team with winners of Deshpande Center grants on a specific project to assess the commercial prospects of scientific and engineering breakthroughs emerging from MIT's preeminent labs. You're guided by the labs' Principal Investigators, faculty from the MIT entrepreneurship Center, and leaders of local businesses. Together we determine technological directions and identify product markets. Together we deliver on the promise of bringing MIT-born innovation to fruition.

I was involved with a $50k team, which specializes in nanotechnology, last spring semester. It was truly an exciting and humbling experience; I realized simultaneously that how I know and don't know about commercializing a technology from the experience. The i-Teams course definitely sounds like a cool class and I am interested in taking it to learn more about commercializing a new technology. But interested student can only join the class by applying for it. Let's see how much motivation I get in the next few days to write and submit the application.

7/31/2005 8:33:14 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [1]

School

I have not rested for the last 6 weeks. I am jumping from one task to another without resting or relaxing. The 2 time suckers, besides work, at the moment are school and selling my condo. But I am seeing light at the end of the tunnel now. The summer semester is coming to a close in less than 2 weeks and I am finally putting my old apartment on the market next week. I can't wait when I can actually sit down and just goof off doing absolutely nothing and not feeling guilty about being unproductive.

To prepare my old apartment for sale next week, I cleaned and fixed my old apartment the entire day. Unfortunately, the installation of fence panels at the side of the house took up substantial chunk of my afternoon time. Other than the fence, I have been productive in fixing a bunch of things around the house. However, my first pass on the grouting in the bathroom didn't turn out the way I wanted it to be. The problem was that I didn't use the sponge to gives that nice finishing touch. Anyhoo, I regrouted the tiles, this time with the sponge, and bathroom tiles never look better.

7/30/2005 11:37:30 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

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Personal

I went to a schmoozing event for LFM, SDM, and SF students at the Enormous Room earlier this evening. It was a causal social event organized by one of the Sloan Fellows for the purpose of meeting people from three academic programs at MIT Sloan. Other than being affiliated with the MIT Sloan brand name and being at MIT for the summer semester, we really don't interact much together other than perhaps meeting one another at the hallway. Thanks to the organizer. This was a good idea of meeting other cool students at Sloan.

Starving for food, Ilana, John Haj., and I went down to Green Street Grill - another fine establishment - where John treated us for a sumptuous meal. Thanks John. We then went to another MIT party where we met more cool people from Aero/Astrospace graduate students. The highlight of the party was the exchange of anecdotes between SDMers and Aerospace students on Prof. Crawley. Overall, a fun night. We should do this more often to meet more people in other parts of MIT.

7/29/2005 11:33:14 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [2]

Social

Awesome, my spanking new Adobe Creative Suite Premium software package has finally arrived. I purchased the product last week to take advantage of Adobe's incredible student offer on their 4 most popular creative software. The first order of business is to spice up my website, which is looking a little dull now. I plan on using the software to create a new mind-blowing design for this website during the short school break in 2 weeks.

7/28/2005 11:10:28 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [1]

Personal

Unlike System Engineering assignment 3, which I was enthusiastic for, I am unmotivated on the final project for our System Engineering class. We were presented with 2 options for our final project for System Engineer. We can work on improving the efficiency of a jet engine or we can present processes and methodologies for the development of military system call Theater Battle Management Core System (TBMCS). Either topic isn't very appealing to me. The TBMCS case study is the worst between the two. The TBMCS case study is the longest I have ever read, all 70 page long. Wow!!! I am leaning towards to the Jet Engine case study. It is more quantitative (less reading and writing) and I might even be able to combine materials that were covered from my Fabrication Technology class. If someone knows how to get me motivated for this assignment, please let me know.

7/28/2005 1:07:00 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [4]

School

Today, I have just found a new incentive for blogging - getting the opportunity to review films. An independent film director, whose name and film I am going to withhold, emailed me yesterday about getting me to review his film. He said that he has been reading my blog and would like my critical inputs on his film before its release in the fall. Also, I have just discovered that my blog is now featured on Milkplus - a blog dedicated to the review and discussion of films. Wow, both discoveries are big surprises for me as I never consider myself a film buff let alone a film critic. All I did in the past 6 months was writing a few short commentaries on the films that saw. Nonetheless, this is exciting news as it represents an opportunity for me to critique films and practice critical writing.

7/27/2005 12:42:42 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

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Movies

Just to follow up on Yoav's comment on System Engineering (the class) for being too focused on process and repeatable results. So far, the lessons that we learned from SysEng are about quality and productivity. While Six Sigma, Robust Design, and TQM are yesterday's ideas, they are by no means obsolete. I think that both SysEng (the practice) and innovation can coexist together. With a growing number of companies striving to build more innovation in their organization. However, I think that SysEng should include more materials on innovation and creativity thinking. In other words, we need to develop leaders for growth and if innovation is one area where the economy is going. So from an SDM perspective, I think it is a great idea to include an extended or more advanced version of Prof. Eric von Hippel's excellent class in Innovations in the Marketplace to the SDM core curriculum.

Going back to the special report titled "Get Creative! How to Build Innovative Companies" that appears on the latest issue of Business Week, there's a section in the special report that talks about how some business schools are already redesigning their curriculum to meet the growing demand for creative, innovative managers. Traditionally, business schools have introduced electives in product design into their curriculum, with mixed results. And now, a few schools are starting to experiment with integrative programs that foster design thinking that can be applied to product and business design. For example, the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto will soon offer such program that will lead to a Master of Business Design (or MBD).

7/26/2005 1:26:28 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [1]

Business

I have just finished reading special report titled "Get Creative! How to Build Innovative Companies" that appears on the latest issue of Business Week (or BW). This report is well articulated and provokes thoughts that supplemented well to System Engineering, a class I am currently taking at MIT. I only wish that our readings for that class would have included something like the highlight Business Week article.

There are several key points to take from this special report. Basically, BW argues that as technology and information become commoditized and globalized, a new corporate model that focuses on creativity and innovation is beginning to emerge from the industry and could provide new growth avenues. It is the creativity economy, stupid. The knowledge economy has now been replaced the creativity economy. As manufacturing outsourcing to China, India, and Eastern Europe becomes more prevalent, the key management principle is no longer Six Sigma or even Total Quality Management but Design Strategy. Companies with rich culture of innovation and creativity stands to win.

As I look in the featured poll: The Top 20 Innovative Companies in the World, it is no surprise why Apple and Microsoft are in the top 3 positions. But if you think that innovation is only about creating insanely products, you are wrong. Innovation and creativity can be applied to wide spectrum of corporate competences, from supply-chain to brand marketing to manufacturing. So is creativity and innovation the next big thinking in management science? I'll continue to think critically about this.

7/25/2005 1:21:55 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [1]

Business

After reading an old article from Harvard Business Review and a special report on Creativity from Business Week the past weekend, I maybe wrong about HP cutting down on R&D in my last blog entry where I alluded to R&D as the main source of a company's innovations. In the grand scheme of things, innovative ideas can be created or sought from other sources both inside and outside the company. Drawing from what I have learned from school, academic business papers, and my own observations and reflections innovations transcend R&D, its no longer just designing products based on new technologies and sell them to customers. There's a new emphasis on creativity and how it can create competitive advantage for companies. I am going to elaborate more on this on my subsequent blog entry...

7/25/2005 1:18:11 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

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Business

Partly inspired by Lance's Tour de France win and partly motivated by the awesome weather, I went for a run with Camille in the afternoon. We ran the same route that I did yesterday. Running in the company of another runner sure made the run easier. After today's run, I am going to start running regularly like I did before summer school. So here's an idea, perhaps I should start looking for a running companion - preferably female .

7/24/2005 10:22:01 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [3]

Sports

Lance Armstrong did again. Today, Lance rode into retirement with a 7th consecutive win in the Tour de France. His run of success will go down in the sports annals as arguably one of the greatest sport achievement. Diagnosed with a terminal cancer and given less than a 50-50 chance of survival, he miraculously recovered and came back to win his first Tour de France title in 1999 and he was been winning the Tour every year since then. Very few athletes have attained the dominance and consistency as those of Lance Armstrong.

As I recall from a recent ESPN feature on Lance, he was genetically gifted with a 10% bigger than average heart and through training he enlarged his heart to 30%. According to a conversation with Yoav last Friday, Lance has a 35 heartbeats per minute (bpm) resting and 200 bpm at his peak. Wow!!! He is a freak of nature. Nonetheless, congratulations to Lance on your win today and may your achievements inspire people, including me, in years to come.

7/24/2005 1:17:11 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [3]

Sports

Lately, I have been feeling really stressed from school, moving, selling my condo, and everything else. Worse, my sedentary lifestyle has left me feeling unfit, somewhat lethargic, and easily vexed. That is why I felt really good when I finally went for my first run in a month and a half earlier today. I also discovered that Kristall beverage is amazingly refreshing after a run. Unlike American beverages, which are overloaded with sugar, I prefer the lighter and intriguing taste of the European beverages. Why doesn't Coke or Pepsi realize that their drinks will taste so much better by reducing their sugar level by at least half!!!

7/23/2005 8:09:34 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [0]

Sports