It is a very hectic time to join the NHS. Although the NHS is supposedly maintaining its budget in real terms, in fact demand is rapidly outstripping supply and in the hospital sector we are looking to make c.30% efficiency savings over the next 5 years. That means lots of cost cutting both of the salami slicing and the strategic innovation kinds.

I was reminded to update this blog because yesterday I was on a panel of people in front of a section of this year’s MBA cohort talking about my experiences and trying to get people to come and do MBA projects in my new organisation. A couple of the audience members actually told me they recognised me from reading my blog – great stuff! I am writing this blog back in the Imperial Central library because I got an extension on my final project and am now frantically writing up the work I did over the summer at the Trust (which turned into a job). One of the reasons I stopped writing my blog was that I spent much less time in the library working where blogging is the ideal way to distract yourself. Now I am back finishing my project blogging is a good distraction again.

How do I feel about my MBA now? It was a great year and I have accomplished my objectives and more. There is a lot being written about how MBAs aren’t what they used to be. Perhaps that’s true but they are very useful nonetheless. Mine has given me a great set of tools that I have been using nearly everyday in my new job. I have made new friends and developed a great network. I have made a role and sector change, albeit one that made sense with my past experience. The MBA cannot work magic, but if you really work on getting the most out of it, it cannot fail to be a great investment. I am hearing of quite a few people getting great jobs already. Many are yet to get the job they want but I am sure they will get there.

I really enjoyed writing my blog. I considered starting another one but I am really busy and feel that I shouldn’t add another demand on my time, so…. farewell!

I have begun reading my first fiction book since starting the MBA. Normally I read quite a lot of fiction but so far have avoided reading anything that isn’t directly related to the MBA. This is not a sign that I have less to do; it is more an attempt to begin my transition back into the real world in October. I can’t live the rest of my life only focusing only on work after all and I need to get back to real world standards of managing work/life balance.

Just in case you’re interested I am reading Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. It is roughly part of the science fiction genre but when I tell people I am reading science fiction I get a look that says: “Oh, I didn’t know you were a geek.” I  read Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle last year and absolutley loved it. Having studied English Lit at uni first time round, people sometimes ask me what I’m reading hoping to get some high brow injection of literary magic. My answers usually disappoint, though that is usually because many people’s conception of great literature does not include any crime fiction, or sc-fi – which is grossly unfair. Having read Joyce, Delillo, Dickens and Eliot, I can tell you that Stephenson is up there with the best. Read the Baroque Cycle and find out for yourself!

Our team ‘won’ the competition – we didn’t realise it was a competition until the end when we told we would get vouchers for the gourmet cheese shop, la formagerie. On the team with me was Vlad, Emily, Francesca, Su, Rui and Richard. I’ve attached the presentation: Final Group 4 Obesity Presentation master.

So, it is with great deliberation that I am finally plumping for a particular career path. Well, I say particular career path I really mean sector: public sector management. That could mean in consultancy (like I used to do), or as a public sector manager myself.

I figured that I have lots of experience in that area (seven years, including a year as deputy manager of a SUre Start programme, the rest in consultancy). I love it – I love the people, the culture (it’s not all about bureaucracy, it’s about helping people and getting value for money for the public). The money ain’t great, I could definitely earn a lot more, especially five years or so down the line. But my wife and I decided that money isn’t everything.

It means that the financial case for doing the MBA is pretty thin, but I’m on it now, so it’s a sunk cost and therefore shouldn’t form part of my decision. The benefits of having an MBA should be substantial for a career in the public sector. I don’t buy the usual cliche that the public sector is full of hopeless managers that depserately need some private sector discipline (I think the last couple of years have put the kibosh on that crap). But an MBA will be very useful nonetheless and will hopefully make me stand out from the crowd.

Although this decision feels like a great step forward the irony is that I’ve just come full circle to where I was last summer. My application to Imperial describes my current plan almost perfectly but I spent the last few months exploring lots of other possibilities.

This term is a lot less structured than last term, a bit more like the real world, though still a long way off. Every full time MBA student has to do six ‘electives’, the business school’s term for the courses you choose from a large selection. My choices are:

Managing Negotiations

Designing and Innovating Services

Hi-tech strategy

Corporate Social Responsibility (though the description makes it look more like an intro to the theory of public policy)

Strategic Management Accounting

Managing Change

I’m midway through my third elective. My choices are all bunched up early in the year – some people finish their electives in August, I finish mine in June. Coupled with the IED project (workshop 2 completed, workshop 2 on the horizon), finding a good summer project and finding a job after the MBA I am very busy.

I wrote so many blogs last term because I spent so much time in the library looking for things to avoid working, but this term I have not been in the library anywhere near as much so have not had the inclination.

I am trying to live the seven habits of highly effective people, as propounded by Stephen Covey. I have a love-hate relationship with this kind of thing. The English Literature student in me is sniffy about the corny, sometimes superficial and shallow style dressed up in depth and deep thinking. But they can be damn useful. I like that book because it doesn’t give easy solutions but does give a few handy tools. One of them is the quadrants for self-management:

Basically the very sound advice is that you should be trying to do things in the non-urgent but important quadrant as much as possible. I’d like to think blogging was in that quadrant but there are times when it gets pushed down into the not important/not urgent quadrant I’m afraid.

I am now in anxiety-causing sight of the real world. Having turned the calendar corner that was new year, I can see my money running out and and the need to have a job looming large. I have begun networking, tapping up old contacts and exploring what I might do afterwards.

Do I do what I did before, but in a slightly better role? Maybe.

Do I attempt to make a big change? Maybe.

Do I make money a goal and try to recoup some of my sunk costs? Maybe.

Do I go for what energises me and makes proud of what I do? Well, duh, yes, of course.

I’m in a bit of a pickle because given the fact that when you google my name, this blog comes up, I need to avoid writing anything that might jeopardise future career prospects. So I can’t write that I couldn’t imagine anything worse that working for XXXX company, because i’m changing my mind so fast I might want to work for them next week, and someone might read my blog.

In fact I can’t imagine working for quite a lot of companies. I dearly wish I could abuse them on this blog. I think it would make good reading. But I must stay cool and collected.

Imagine a stretch of beach with sunbathers evenly spread along it. You are a selling cold drinks, and there is another seller, selling the same drinks at exactly the same price. The only strategic choice left for you is location along the beach because sunbathers will simply walk to the drinks vendor closest to them. You could locate yourself in the middle of one half of the beach i.e. 1/4 of the way along, and hope that the other guy does the same at the other end of the beach. But if you did that the other guy could simply locate himself in the centre of the whole beach and take about 62.5% of the whole market. So you both end up  in the centre of the whole beach (and probably end up having to differentiate yourself in some way).

This logic shows why petrol stations end up so close to each other. And it also shows why political parties move inexorably towards the centre as elections near. It doesn’t pay to be off to the left or right. So the real battle of an election is in defining the centre (this is where polling and other research comes in), and arguing why your party is much more representative of the centre than the other party.

So where is the centre? Well recently Gordon Brown made a comment about “the playing fields of Eton” – this was designed to create a perception of the Conservatives as way off centre, promoting the interests of a thin slice of the population at one end of the spectrum. He has since pushed this further, stressing that he is not targeting his core vote (i.e. left of centre), but the middle classes.

They’ve been going okay so far but ideas of great marks are pretty much out of the window. I didn’t do enough work over the xmas holidays and have been realising this every day. But I feel like I’m on the home straight. I mustn’t lose momentum. I was feeling pretty stressed over last weekend but am finally beginning to get my head round financial statements which is convenient, given the exam is on Friday. Though I am taking fairlyhigh risk strategies in terms of the number of topics I am revising.

Business economics is not my best subject, but one of the most interesting. I answered questions on tax (what would be the effect of an increase on stamp duty) and externalities (should the price of cigarettes be left to the free market) and price discrimination (I talked about how companies can make more money by having entry fees and per use charges, and why sometimes you want to decrease the quality of software to make more money).

—Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776)

Last term in Business Economics we watched a series of videos taped by the FBI of price fixing by multinational chemical companies (fixing the price of lysine, an industrial chemical). [BTW this counts as revision as I am learning about collusion for an exam on Monday] The quotation from Adam Smith has dated a little - law enforcement agencies (at least in the developed world) go out of their way to prevent and break up cartels.

What strikes me from the videos is how brazen they are. Little did they know that one of their number had gone to the FBI and was wired. In fact by coincidence they released a film recently about this called the Informant with Matt Damon.

They (that is, the real life ‘they’ - I don’t know what they did in the film) use a trade association as cover and Mark Whitacre, the informant, convinces the Japanese to meet in Hawaii - I assume this was so the FBI would still have jurisdiction. Whitacre convinces the Japanese guy over the phone by saying how good the golf will be.

There ate two main challenges for an effective cartel: actually agreeing on how to collude, and enorcing that agreement. On the first challenge lysine has many properties that may lead to a successful cartel:

• it is a homogenous product.
• The market is highly concentrated: the four largest firms control most of the U.S. and world markets, and the four largest buyers purchase less than 30 percent of the total market.
• Buyers make infrequent, large purchases.
• Entry is difficult because new plants are expensive, take a long time to build, and need skills

In fact lysine is so good for cartel behaviour they tried it again in the late nineties, and got caught resulting in prison sentences and a $100million fine.

Thanks to Jonathan Haskel for the lecture and all the videos, which I uploaded to youtube and show below.

1.    The cartel firms felt that they needed all the major firms to participate. {Segment 1 of the lysine movie shows the conspirators discussing and introducing the various firms involved.}

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDH0Rv8R0SQ

2.    They fixed prices and allocated quantities that could be sold to each firm. {The cartel members discuss fixing prices in segment 4 and allocating output in segment 5.}

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vs8nk-_bFgs

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywNSPfb6w7M

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu3TQy1Jk4M

3.    They used their industry organization to collect data and provide cover for their illicit meeting. {See segment 3.}

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBa6PVupH8c

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytNI56yzbQg

5.    They had a punishment scheme in place to prevent firms from exceeding their quotas {See segments 7 and 8.}

www.youtube.com/watch?v=atojWdNVKSk

www.youtube.com/watch?v=niSkTt3MY9Y