What Greg Learned – NO MORE CLASSES

Transcript after the break, as usual. I AM DONE with sitting in classes and, given the classes this term in particular, couldn’t be happier. Hear me wax poetic about United Technologies, grumble about prisoners and their dilemmas, and more.

Aaaand… maybe this is it. Maybe this is the final bit for this whole blog-ospective take on my continuing education whatsnot. But either way… I should make myself do this, shouldn’t I? It’s What Greg Learned. And I am DONE DONE DONE with classes.

I don’t really feel like recounting the events in-class of this weekend and last. It’d be boring, and it’s exactly in tune with all semester. Strategy is interesting to me. R&D is not well-taught… it might not really be possible to teach in such a low-level brief way with a room full of people looking at wildly different industries. Software, well, I already knew the content so it turned out not to be so useful but it was enjoyable. Computational Finance’s interesting material is completely undercut by the awful in-class lectures, which culminated yesterday in the prof putting a wall street journal article up on powerpoint and reading it to us as his final chunk of class. It would have made perfectly appropriate assigned reading before class, and the time would have been interesting to use in lively classroom discussion about the frickin’ financial crisis.

Yes, I have to say this. The world’s economy was brought to its knees in the past three years by exactly what we were learning about in this class. And the attention spent to that crisis, in the end, amounted to the professor reading us a Wall Street Journal article… from 2004.

Anyway. I’m not truly done yet. We have a final project for that class, which was supposed to be given to us a week ago but only just got posted, or should have been. Also… well, I’ll get to the strategy thing last, because it’s the most interesting thing to talk about now. Before that I’ll mention that oddly enough the high point in R&D was the paper, which I was not excited about. It required a deeper-than-comfortable dive into how R&D is handled at a company, and by luck of the draw I ended up researching United Technologies Corporation. I think I probably mentioned this back when the draw happened back at the start of the term. What I didn’t mention is that, as it turns out, the company’s science and research is exciting, interesting, well-run, focused truly on doing great science, has a large amount of devotion these days to energy efficiency and sustainable tech, and overall fuels a big GE-type industrial conglomerate of aerospace and construction component parts to super high performance. I really enjoyed researching them and got to interview someone at their research campus to learn more about the inner workings. When it comes time to throw a resume around, they’ll be on my list.

So… as I mentioned. Strategy. The prof proposed that, rather than a final, we play this online strategy game thing. So the class broke into teams and every few days we post our “moves” for the year for our little fake shoe company in fake world. You can balance your production between factories in Asia or Latin America or North America or whatever, set incentive pay and normal pay and societal initiatives, and so on. I was appalled at the idea of this game as an assessment tool, but the prof has shrugged at that and says he doesn’t really care too much about grades and we shouldn’t worry. Fine. So now it’s mostly a learning tool. What my team learned was, “Get out of the way and let Greg drive.” What several teams learned is, “Google will tell you how to win this game.” And what they’re now learning is: “If Greg is driving a team, your cheap-ass Google strategy won’t save you.” Like any business game, particularly a strategy or economy one, it boils down quickly to a prisoner’s dilemma type setup. I know I mentioned this before. If everybody prices for a profit, then produces goods in the volume they expect to sell at that price, then everybody makes pretty good money and teams compete in making slightly better shoes or reducing their costs of production or whatever. BUT, if one team decides to build a ton of capacity, they get efficiencies of scale, which drives down their costs considerably… but only if they produce all these extra shoes. Well, to sell all those extra shoes, what do they need to do? Drop prices. Steeply. This lets them capture market share, and all the other teams suddenly are scrambling for a much smaller chunk of the pie.

As I think of it, it’s the difference between playing to win, where you worry about making your company awesome, versus playing to make others lose – if you tank the market and drive it into a state where only you can make money (even if you’re making much less money than you would if you played for profit), then you will… well, this gets back to that whole question of why this makes a bad assessment tool. It’s harder to earn first place sometimes than it is to pull everybody else down.

But…well, they’ll have a hard time pulling us down, because I’m really finding my stride. And while I’m getting sick of the accolades from my teammates, I know I’m good, but there’s a pretty obvious reason: IT’S A GAME. This is what I do.

Anyway, I’ll try to do one more cleanup posting to talk about the program as a whole, or maybe follow up with my job search once that starts. But this is plenty of post for today. See ya!