Now career development is obviously a major factor in choosing to do an MBA. And Imperial has a careers service that supports you right through the year. I have a dedicated careers coach and access to all sorts of opportunities and resources. And of course the content of the courses will help me in my career. Etc Etc

But I hadn’t realised the stuff I learnt on the MBA would provide careers advice in itself. For example:

Macroeconomics (BTW we do this class mainly as background – it was separated from business econ only this year in the light of the recession etc) – we have been learning about ricardian comparative advantage – usually applied to countries but equally applicable to individual career development. Essentially this fundamental principle of economics suggests that I should devote my time to where my relative opportunity cost is the lowest compared to my ‘competitors’. This sounds sensible enough but often doesn’t happen. I think I’ve spent a lot of the last seven years not playing to my strengths and am resolved to play to my strengths in the future.

Strategy - lots of careers advice here. Firstly industry analysis techniques suggest that I should be finding professions with high barriers to entry – so I need to go places where my MBA is valued and people without MBAs find it difficult. What kind of strategy should I follow? Well I don’t want to be a cost leader – no one wants that I guess, but I need to be a differentiator. But the best advice from strategy class is to focus on your core competences (similar to the comparative advantage point) and also focus on preventing imitators through a hard to copy approach.

Marketing - well the focus on shareholder value in marketing emphasises long term, durable cash flow, and a focus on customer satisfaction.  I think this means that I shouldn’t operate a slash and burn strategy, hopping from job to job – but build long term customer (employer)  relationships that will reduce the cost of sales (job hunting) and open up new opportunities.

Accounting - what does accounting have to tell me about careers? Well it’s all about depreciation – the cost of assets should be depreciated across their working life. The cost of my MBA, including opportunity costs is into six figures.  But discounted across a long period it becomes much more realistic. Key lesson – renew your assets to meet future challenges.

Organisational Behaviour - well there’s been so much careers advice here I don’t know where to start.

I’m beginning to think I need to do something much more interesting than the usual opportunities. I would rather shoot myself in the knee than drift into bureaucratic nonsense. Hmmm, need to think harder about what I want to do when I finish…

Now that Copenhagen is essentially a resounding failure, my exams are finished, and christmas is coming, I thought I’d go for a more light hearted blog post, but one no less close to my heart.

Biryani, or pilao, is a rice dish cooked with meat or fish or vegetables – it’s my favourite food. Most food cultures have an equivalent: paella, risotto, jambalaya, jollof rice, nasi goreng etc.

What makes biryani stand out is that the rice is very slowly cooked in the cooking juices – nothing else makes a biryani. My (Hyderabadi) mother uses a very traditional method of par cooking the rice before layering it with the meat and sauce and then sealing the dish with a dough.

Every region of South Asia has its own recipe – some add nuts, raisins, potatoes, garnish with fried onion. There’s always a slight difference in the combination of spices.

There are very few places you can get real biryani in London. The vast majority of ‘Indian’ restaurants in the UK actually stir fry rice and a meat curry and call that biryani – it’s not. (But it can be nice too) In my experience the only place I’ve found it in restaurants is in east London – Bangladeshis make great biryani. Biryani House and Dhaka Biryani are the only places which regularly make real biryani. Every day they make a huge pot full and sell it in portions for £4 (or less) It is definitely worth the trip if you are biryani connoseur. Strangely they are a few doors away from each other – I’m sure I should know some economics reason for that to be the case. I used to work a few doors down at the Sure Start and went to these places way too often.  Having said all this – they are a pale imitation of home made biryani – even mine is better than the restaurant version. They are also essentially cafes in pretty grim areas of London (sorry whitechapel high street) so you have to be really committed!

UPDATE: I just received an email from the manager of Kadiris restaurant in Willesden who says that they make the traditional style of biryani – I will definitely be looking into this!

BTW A remnant of the Jewish East End is Rinkoff’s, the best Jewish bakery in London (and I lived in Golders Green for six years). The bread is gorgeous.

Having worked in Whitechapel and Old Street, South Ken is unfortunately finding it hard to compete on the cheap food front. Lots of tourist traps. The uni food is okay and cheap though, but a bit like school dinners. So I thoroughly recommend that you venture beyond the immediate area; London is great for food!

Yesterday we chose not to remember that we have more exams after christmas and took the chance to celebrate christmas, finishing the first batch of exams, the end of the first term, and anything else we could think of. Thai food in fulham started at 730pm, leaving a worryingly long time between the morning exam and dinner.

I’m going to forget about the next set (Finance, Accounting, Macroecon, Business Econ) and the coursework for a few days and do nothing for the first time in 2 and a half months.

Next week I am catching up with various people and things, and generally chill out. I’ll maybe get around to doing those posts that involve me uploading things to youtube. I will certainly clean up the house.

At some point I need to start applying for some jobs…

As I wait to do my strategy exam (I’m in absurdly early to avoid snow related transport disruptions that never materialised), world leaders are busy carving up their rights to the sky. Global temperature increases of 2 degrees equate to about 3-4 degrees for Africa. The Copenhagen conference is provoking worrying memories of the Berlin Conference, which legitimised the scramble for Africa, behind the facade of humanitarian concern.

This time rich world leaders are professing their concern for the world, knowing that they will not bear the brunt, despite being largely to blame. Poor countries in Africa and elsewhere are being fobbed off with a climate change target that sentences them to disaster. It’s the scramble for Africa all over again. Except this time they’re not looking for African resources, they’re looking for the sky, their right to emit carbon, but by a twist of fate that comes at the expense of Africa and other extremely poor countries.

In fact it’s not a coincidence. Jared Diamond’s work (e.g. Guns Germs and Steel) argues that it is Africa’s geographical history (it’s admittedly more complicated than that alone) that condemned it to be the laggard of world development.  It’s still paying the price.

I went to the regular annual dinner for volunteers at Westminster Youth Offending Team. Since April 2004 I’ve been a community panel member. That means whenever a young person (10-17) pleads guilty to their first conviction, the get referred to a community panel, made up of me and two other people. We decide what they should do to make up for the offence – could be hours of unpaid work in the community – and what the Youth Offending Team (like probation for kids) should do stop that young person offending again.

It’s all about ‘restorative justice’ which means making sure the young person takes responsibility for the offence and to highlight the effect on the victim. Where possible the victim actually attends the meeting, or we get a statement from the victim. Where that isn’t possible it’s our duty as members of the community to represent the victim, in a sense.

Things can get hairy in the meetings – I’ve had a 12 year old kid get up and run down the street with his supervising officer chasing him. He had been caught stealing in school and when they searched his locker his teachers found a big knife. I would say 99% of the young people I see have had serious schooling problems, often with some background of family breakdown. Often it is only when they offend that they get the kind of intensive support they need – though often that is too late to prevent further problems.

The BBC made a programme about Youth Justice for use in schools. It features an actor playing a young person and his encounters with the youth justice ‘system’. Everyone else in the series were ‘real’ people and they filmed a staged panel which I chaired. It was very weird to do my usual thing with cameras watching, with a pretend case. You can see the video on the BBC site by clicking on the picture below.

I’m afraid it involves me being very serious which doesn’t help my efforts to convince you that I’m not as serious as my picture at the top of the blog suggests.

Still mid exams, trying to learn about various theories of team decision making right now – wrote this a while ago after the actual class, but never got around to posting it…

Had a class about interest rate setting. Was stunned about how interest rates are actually set. When you hear the Bank of England (BoE) have ‘set’ an interest rate, what is actually happening is very diffuse and in the current siutation, prone to failure.

Our lecturer likened it to“shooting at a moving target, while wearing a blindfold, with a bullet that moves very slowly, at unpredictable speeds.” He was hardly exaggerating.

Interest rates are a key lever of monetary policy and the BoE has two ways of influencing them (in common with other developed economies)

Setting the rate at which banks can borrow from the central bank – interestingly this turns out to be quantitatively insignificant. That is until the credit crunch -  see this amazing chart from the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis:

See that huge increase in lending by the central bank! Crazy. (the grey bars denote periods of recession) But it remains that usually the discount rate is usually just a signalling device, particularly in the context of the second main lever:

Open Market operations: the central banks either buy or sell bonds in order to affect liquidity, hoping this will ripple through into the interest rates that banks set for their customer:

If they sell bonds it takes cash out of the system and reserves and the money supply falls (and interest rates rise) .

If they buy bonds it injects cash into the system and the money supply rises (and interest rates fall).

I had no idea it was such a hit and miss affair! At the moment we’re getting information about the current crisis from two directions: our finance lecturer and our macroeconomics lecturer. The dual perspectives are fascinating….

There’s an analogy used in marketing of a leaky bucket – essentially the point is that it’s cheaper to plug holes in your bucket by stopping customers leaving, by providing good service, than it is to keep trying to fill the bucket (with new customers).

At the moment my brain feels like a leaky bucket, but as the lectures end the tap is slowing down and now it’s my job to plug the holes and actually remember enough to do three exams next week: Marketing, Strategy and Organisational behaviour. These should be my strong subjects. After xmas we have four more exams: finance, business economics, economic framework (macro), and accounting.

But these ones are content heavy, and the challenge is to remember enough. I can’t help some evaporation – it’s inevitable. But at the moment my main form of learning involves pacing around with my notes in hand, memorising page by page. I have 170 pages of notes. I have gone down the route of learning as much as possible, figuring that my brain can handle it. It’s going to amount to a small proportion of all the knowledge I have in my brain so I should be able to – the only difference is the speed. But I think that’s just effort.

Even then I have not gone beyond the compulsory reading. I could be more tactical and learn fewer topics, but the exams are structured in ways that hinder that approach.

And even if I learn all this stuff I reckon that’s only half the battle: all three are case study based exams and if I miss the point of the case, or misread a question, or can’t write fast enough then I’ll have trouble. My handwriting is awful – always has been but it is even worse after nine years of doing hardly any.

When we had our surprise test in strategy a couple of weeks ago(worth 30% of the course!) my heart was pumping. And that was when I knew the questions in advance and had prepared my answers.  I will try and enjoy the exams I tell myself….

Wish me luck!

Just had a class on social networks. The lecturer, Jonathan Pinto, gave us his personal tips on networking. His emphasis is not on the strategic, slightly cynical approach typically associated with MBAs. He is about spreading the net wide, getting as much diversity and depth in your networks as possible. He prescribes taking advantage of every situation, whether it be on a tube platform or in more obvious networking locations. It is more about personal fulfilment than getting ahead, but he also argues that from all this networking can come the 1% that will get you ahead. Here are his tips:

• Networks power can supplement/complement/substitute for other power
• Never turn down an opportunity
  • Work expands to fill time available
  • Necessity is the mother of invention
  • Opportunity-provider may never offer you another
  • You may never know what it could lead to (butterfly effect, domino effect)
• Exploit ‘dead’ time ie waiting in queues, on bus train
• Take risks
  • Try activities you have never tried before e.g. art, theatre, dance, music
  • Initiate conversations
• Listen to / engage with anyone and everyone
• High energy / high cheerfulness almost always a big positive
• If you make a promise, keep it
• Being strategic i.e. schmoozer  or working the room could backfire

We had a great speaker visit our final marketing lecture. A semi-retired head of marketing from one of the major US airlines. He now spends his time touring business schools talking about his experiences. The airline industry sounds like a tough place – a startling fact he told us is that since its beginnings, airlines have in total made an overall loss!

However when it came to answering a question about carbon emissions he was a bit disingenuous. He began by saying that we should “separate fact from rhetoric” and asserted that aviation only contributes 1.8% of global CO2 emissions. He then went on to ridicule climate change hypocrites who preach about climate change but keep flying. I’ve been googling to try and find the provenance of the 1.8% figure and can’t find it. I vaguely remember it being the figure used in one of the IPCC reports, or maybe the Stern report. I’d be interested to hear from anyone who can find the origin. I don’t doubt the truth of the figure but much more important is what it represents and what future trends are.

Everything I’ve read about this shows that this is a very complicated issue. Because planes fly so high, calculating the simple emissions may not be useful as at that altitude climate change emissions have a much bigger impact.

It is estimated that flying is responsible for about 13% of climate change emissions from the UK. Also flying accounts for a very high proportion of the typical Imperial student’s climate change contribution. I’m guessing that as a group we fly more than most – I just calculated that a return trip to New York, and a couple of trips in europe (to Rome and Madrid) come to about three tonnes of CO2. That’s about a third of the average UK emissions per person in 2005. So by this speaker’s logic, no one else in the world should be allowed to fly, to allow the ones who fly now to continue.

So the problem with flying is that they account for a very large proportion of our CO2 emissions and over the next 30 years will account for a similar proportion of the rest of the world’s carbon footprint; flying is increasing massively with development; and there doesn’t seem to be any prospect of major technological methods of reducing the climate change impact.

The speaker ridiculed the Bishop of London who said a while ago that flying should be considered a sin. I think that was a bit ostrich-like on the part of the speaker. There are billions of people around the world who have never flown and if they are ever going to get the chance to fly, then per capita flying needs to go down. It’s simple arithmetic. The Bishop of London may have been using dramatic language, couched in his own world view, but the fact remains that flying and climate change is going to be one of the big issues over the next few decades at least.

I’ve been trying to cut my flights down to only those necessary – for me that means weddings. We’ve taken a few overland holidays over the past couple of years where we would have previously flown. Using ChooseClimate I calculated the total warming effect of the flights I’ve taken since I graduated in June 2000. It’s the only carbon calculator I’ve found that takes into the extra effect of altitude:

Sorry about the resolution – wordpress doesn’t like me today. The table below shows the numbers and the actual holidays this involved (I’ve excluded my one and only work flight!)

I went to Morocco a lot! Five of these flights were for weddings. As you can see we have reduced our flying quite considerably – but we have the massive advantage of living near our immediate families. But even then we have had to make special efforts to miss out on all sorts of nice trips. Please, somebody, come up with a clean fuel for flying!

Doing an MBA naturally exposes me to lots of cringey business speak – leveraging this and integrating that. I came across a great line about how using peers to persuade people rather than higher ranking people can be more effective:

“Stated simply, influence is often best exerted horizontally rather than vertically”. Ha! “Stated Simply”! Having said that, I do get what he means, and although business is very jargony I would say most of the jargon is useful either for getting a point across more clearly or more efficiently.

I think mainstream academic disciplines are much worse. I read an article for organisational behaviour that is rooted in sociology and psychology, and found this humdinger:

“In general, the degree of dependence of s2(a) on O, following O’s influence, can be defined as equal to the amount of retrogression following the removal of O from the life space of P: Degree of dependence of s2(a) on O = s2(a) – s3(a).

The whole article read like that. In plain English:

“When person A is exerting some kind of power over person B, the effect that power has can be measured by the change in behaviour of Person B when Person A stops exerting the power, whether directly or indirectly.”

Now my version is not that ‘plain’ it must be said but it’s not that simple an idea. The article was trying to get something relatively complicated across, and the author thought that using some scientific sounding terminology would help – they were wrong. They may also have been trying to signal the importance and novelty of their proposed conceptual framework. They didn’t need to. Message to all article writers out there: Please try to make the best use of the language as it exists already, unless of course you’re aiming for comedy value. Then and only then, develop your own terminology.