It’s been a fun few years, but now with a certificate in hand, there’s not much more to say of What Greg Learned.

Naturally I keep learning. Recently I’ve learned how little impact a new degree feels like on a resume, up against a long stint in an academic IT support position. I’ve learned a lot of HTML 5. I’ve learned that knowing a little Japanese is cool, but doesn’t really do much good because people can’t really speak to you in “a little Japanese”. I’ve learned that the one thing I figured an iPad might be handy for, as a very expensive e-reader, turns out not to be very good either because the thing’s a bad size/weight for that and gets all smudgy. In my hands, anyway.

But… I don’t really want to try to keep up a blog to keep track of all that. The content, especially my silly little podcasts, will stay up for a year or so more, according to WordPress. Then they’ll disappear and that’s probably about ten months longer than there’s any justification for. But I don’t expect to write any more.

Hope you learned something too.

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!

As an assessment tool? Horrific. And (*cracking knuckles*) it’s time to show them why.

The good news? Three more weeks. Two of them including weekends where I take classes. And then I’m done! You try being a perfect student under those conditions… I dare you. I’m still far from a bad student, but I’m just sayin’.

And the classes this term aren’t making it any easier. In no particular order, the software class is by far the most enjoyable and the least educational, because I already know the material. We’re moving on to more discussion of elements like cloud computing, which is a plus because I don’t know a ton about that… except as I’m finding out there’s not all that much to know, and NOBODY knows even that much. I have a few people who listen to this who probably would like to know, and this podcast is all about me sorting through my thoughts. In actuality, this is from the reading for next class, so I should wait until then to talk about this, but right now, my take is this: putting something on “The Cloud” is often right now just shorthand for making it available online. That’s bollocks – we’ve been doing that ever since Gopher, ever since BBS systems and CompuServe. What’s different in particular is changing the cost structure of using something, and the flexibility, and the improved efficiency of having a single specialized provider do what they do well for a bunch of customers. A storage network like Amazon’s cloud system can add capacity and guarantee uptime at a far better cost per customer and per terabyte than any university or most companies can, and they can plan around the average growth of all their customers to add capacity so that it’s always available when any customer asks for more space. That’s why the cloud is important. It turns part of the costs of managing a system from a big fixed cost with additional potential big costs to upgrade, scale, or make more reliable, and turns it into a predictable cost that scales smoothly with the amount of business you do.

And the cool part about understanding that is that you can recognize bad uses of the cloud as well as cases screaming out for use of it. I’d say my place of work is crazy for not using an external cloud provider for email, for storage, for database hosting, for SharePoint. But when we talk cloud, half the time I hear us talking about pushing web hosting out, when it’s both relatively easy and far from capacity constrained.

Ah well. If… for whatever reason… I end up here for longer, maybe I can start making my push on this front.

If that’s the most enjoyable class, I’d have to say R&D management is rapidly becoming the least so. The professor’s approach doesn’t seem designed to impart any meaningful knowledge, though he sure does end up handing us a lot of paper with slides printed on them. Many of my profs do this, and the practice throws my learning for a complete loop. If a class is good, I want to take notes because processing what I’m hearing and turning it into my own record of it is how I learn. It’s what I’m doing right now, come to think of it. It keeps my brain engaged, even if the material isn’t exactly rich with intellectual nutrients. But when all I’m hearing is already written down on a piece of paper I’ve been given, which is how this class operates… I got nothing. I still do my best to take notes in his class because I’ve taken it upon myself to stubbornly insist on learning no matter what he does. On the plus side, for our big paper, which involves investigating a company and reporting on its R&D, I was running into some trouble finding enough info so I talked with him after class, and much to my delight he’s been extremely helpful hooking me up with multiple strong possibilities of people I may be able to interview for it. I get the sense I’d be fine with him outside of a teaching environment, and that my furious note-taking in class wins points with him even though I’m sitting in the back with all my fellow almost-done slackers.

Strategic Management threw me for a loop this week as the prof suggested that, rather than having a final, we would play some online game. The final counts for a large portion of our grade, and the game would be with group teams. It’ll actually be more work than a final would be… for us. But none of my classmates saw it that way, figured it was the easy way out, and I wasn’t going to be the twelfth angry man. These games often work as a great demonstration tool of how not understanding the underlying mechanics can lead to ruin… but it’s hard to say they’re much of an assessment tool. Just think of it like the Prisoner’s Dilemma (one of this prof’s favorite topics, since he’s a game theory guy)… the best long-run strategy if you trust everybody else to do what’s right is great and all, but breaking that strategy can screw over everybody… but at the end of the day, the company that broke the strategy is ahead of everybody else. You want to grade people based on this? I can’t think of a more subjective basis for grading, because your grade has to be based on your own values – do you reward the teams that stuck to the best long-term economic value to everybody, or the ones that figured that the only way to avoid losing was to strike first against that strategy? For that matter, I’m so consistently on the “do the nice thing” side of the argument, and if I end up grouped up with strike-first jerks, we’ve got long teleconferences ahead of us. Mostly, given that the class has exactly three data points for a grade – with just two cases and the final, whatever that is, there’s so little actual basis for a grade. I hate even thinking about a grade… I know it doesn’t really matter. But there are so few places in the world where you can legitimately hope for merit-based rewards, and school seems like the one where you can reasonably hope for it.

Let’s move on, though. Computational Finance was mostly characterized by somebody talking about a conversation they had with our prof, who’s obviously very smart. They had said to him that they were concerned that the class was not very geared towards practical understanding of the financial instruments we were talking about – it’s all proofs and abstraction, all very academic. His response: “Well, yes. I’m an academic.” The class is what the class is, and it’s certainly not his fault or his problem. I don’t even pretend to pay attention in class any more – anything he says is covered in better detail in the book and in the spectacular notes he provides in our online class portal. Homework… well, I stopped caring about that after the first one where I lost points for what I will argue TO MY DYING BREATH was an error on his part that damaged the degree to which I will really hold by my claim earlier this paragraph that he’s all THAT smart. His error in logic is extremely logically crafted, and this led him to punish anybody whose logic was more consistent in either direction.

But I’m all about not picking fights, and like I said.. I don’t really want to care about grades. I wish they would stop giving me reasons to care about grades. Luckily this period before class 5 is very light in homework which gives me more time for all those things I talked about last time… sowing seeds for the cosmos and marigolds, weeding around the garlic and carrots, repotting the tomatoes and cucumbers, and getting in a nice double fistful of downtime. And recording this! But no more. That’s all I’ve got, and I’ll see ya later!

I lose track of the numbers, but let’s be frank… they don’t matter. It’s the countdown to the end, and after this weekend that leaves 3!

What? I seem focused on the end, not on the now? Would a 22 minute podcast change your mind? A, um, partial transcript after the break.

It’s a whole new week, after a week off to be grumpy. I’m Greg, this is my podcastblogdiary thing that I call What Greg Learned. And maybe part of the frustration this term is that the literal answer… what I really learned this weekend… is hard to work out.

Let’s face it, though- it’s the last term. I’ve put in five good solid terms of hard effort, a few classes aside, and I’m about to have some credentials to go with some newfound confidence to feel like I can go out and have a shot in all sorts of places. It’s starting to feel occasionally like Spring, we’re into the last half of the last term… heck, it’s time to relax a bit. And, where classes aren’t the brutal boot camp of knowledge that I fantasize about, maybe it’s my place to accept that, in education like in so many other aspects of life, my insistence on not fitting in with an easily generalized target segment of the market means that there’s no money to be made for anybody – television studio, game maker, clothes maker, or even academic program – if their business plan is “Make what Greg wants”.

Maybe that’s what I learned.

Anyway! Strategic management is the most laid back class I’ve had. For one thing, it’s a weird subject to teach. It seems almost like you have to take one subject in business – finance, marketing, leadership, data analysis, microeconomics… and teach the entire curriculum through that lens, because you can describe all of business through any one of those. When you teach a generalized curriculum that has an introduction level course in each of these subjects… like we have… what you end up with are a lot of overlapping bits of subject matter. Strategy consists largely of analyzing what’s going on so you can act with some freakin’ idea of what you’re doing. In a business community, it often means doing pseudo-science and pseudo-math to be able to convince people who aren’t good at either of those disciplines that what you are proposing is based on incontrovertible FACT. Of course, it’s really based on simple arithmetic performed on numbers plucked out of the ether and extrapolated with the business world’s hilarious love of linear relationships.

I don’t mind the class, and do take pretty extensive notes during it. My classmates are… well, less enthusiastic, and can’t seem to get past the prof’s new-agey bearing. So far, though, it’s the class I’d say has the most potential that if I delve into it more I’ll get more payoff.

Research and Development Management certainly doesn’t fall into that. I’m actually pretty impressed that somehow fate worked out that somebody would take all the professors I haven’t liked much up to this point and made a single hybrid professor out of all their worst features. This is the guy who I talked the first week about how he’d mention some obscure person or topic or journal or whatever and ask if anybody knew what he was talking about. I’m starting to think he does that to establish mostly that he knows more than anybody else in the room. He also tends to cycle through that same dozen or so factoids almost as often as each class, and there’s no sign each time that he remembers that he mentioned them before. The lectures are rambly and disorganized, with bad slides that look like the internet was copied and pasted in, and he doesn’t always seem to remember why he put something in there and just reads it to us. Amusingly, you could boil down the sum total of this class to the same as strategic management – you need to analyze the situation and what you’re doing. And when you look at the infantile methods set up for doing this, and realize that many huge and wonderful companies don’t even manage that much thought… you start to wonder how the heck our race managed to beat out the chimpanzees for supremacy. Taller, mostly.

Saturday mornings bring a pleasant enough couple of hours in enterprise software. Which is a fun few hours talking about stuff I do give a damn about, but unfortunately in the context of stuff I already know. I’ve been building software now, professionally, for some fifteen years, and a lot of the concepts are things I’ve had to explore and deal with, even if I didn’t know of the formal names and best practices involved. On the other hand, the funny thing is that I tend to break every rule of formal software engineering and enterprise design. And my code works a hell of a lot better than many code shops that follow all the rules, gets generated faster and cheaper, and as time gets on is getting more and more simple, straightforward, and compact. But that’s all about the luxuries of my environment. Working alone and without a service level agreement means a lot of overhead I don’t have to worry about. Of course, some people would have no idea how to operate in this setup, but my comfort level here is a big reason why I can’t imagine programming in a “real” environment. Most companies have very strict legal and contractual reasons for those rules I poo-poo.

So – like I said. I love the subject matter. Unfortunately, I kind of already know it. Computational Finance is still a big of an enigma to me. Content is provided at a glacial pace – the mathematical underpinnings of every minor logical step carefully presented and re-presented. Homework continues to include algebraic proofs. The full content of each class is provided on a PDF for download and it’s a far better way to learn than the actual class session. Honestly, at this point, I just surf the web all class, keeping one ear open and often still being the one who can answer questions when he stops with one. It’s one of those classes that I still can’t really read. All this could be foundation work… an amazingly careful structured process of setting up a bajillion dominos so that, once set loose, we’re treated to an amazing display. Or maybe the entire class consists of setting up dominos and we never get to knock one over.

So… as you can see, not a ton to get super enthused about, but I’m also beyond the point of minding much. These classes won’t kill me, so I’ll graduate and be done. And maybe if I start devaluing them, that frees up time and energy for everything else that matters, like home and garden and taxes and getting exercise and getting back to my Japanese lessons. I’ll leave off on that thought, since this is all sorts of long. ’til next time, this is Greg, and that’s what I learned. ‘Til next time!

But not cautious about pessimism. Last class of R&D was that bad. After five terms of being a student in this program, I know what’s going to work and what’s not. And whereas the rational thing to do would have been dropping and fleeing to Data Mining (you may recall that I originally was split on which of the two I should take), I’m not going anywhere. Flag is planted and I’m going to, if anything, be way too good a student for this class. One way to think of it is I refuse to let some confused old hack deprive me of the chance to learn.

Yeah, that’s a bit of manic in my grumpy mix. We’ll see if it lasts. But hopefully next week’s more worth talking about.

Having just gotten back from Japan, I was all set to make an enthusiastic, tired, and happy post about my experiences there. Then, as we all know, events took their own turn and it seems like now is not the time to talk about drinking pancakes in a can, not being able to read the onegiri labels, or seeing a robot play a trumpet. That’ll all come, especially as our class finds the right way to share photos and video (often, at a picture-taking moment, I’d see twenty other cameras and phones raise up and would think, “I don’t really need to take a picture, do I?” Which is odd, since it’s not like there’s much cost to taking a picture too). So long story short, yes, of course I’ll talk about Japan, but later, when some of the current tragedy is a lot less vivid. This 8.9-magnitude earthquake, and the series of events that could even lead to a nuclear meltdown, are terrible beyond imagining.

So let’s turn our thoughts back home, admittedly in a bit of a downhearted state. The final term is now underway, with four new classes to think about. Every weekend will now start with Strategic Management, a class I initially rolled my eyes at when it was announced that one of the texts would be Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. It’s every posturing chest-beating businessman’s masculine fantasy, straight out of Wall Street and Liar’s Poker – business as warfare or possible as baseball, proving my sword or cannon or battleship is bigger than yours, and all that. But surprisingly, it got turned on its head by our prof, who’s a Taoist and sees The Art of War in a very different light – war as a metaphor for approaching all of life, the importance of constantly assessing and understanding the situation and the actors, and then of using that knowledge wisely. Amusingly, many of my classmates were then heavily into rolling their eyes even as I got more interested and earnest. As always, the standard disclaimer stands – I tend to like all my classes at the start of the term, but may not be enthusiastic later on – but I’m more bullish now than I was before.

Then in the afternoon is R&D Management – looking at the art of deploying resources and making a company’s research support and tie into its overall strategy, rather than the old school approach of just throwing money into the R&D department and waiting for ideas to come out. This class is certainly the heaviest on reading, with the professor making no bones of the fact that he was providing not only the fifty articles in the bulk pack (plus the four books), but also implying that we might be inclined to read the hundreds of other articles referenced by those first ones. It was a good class, and interesting, but punctuated way too often by him asking the class if we knew about a specific person or organization or business concept or scientific idea… anything… the question would hang in the air as he’d look around and, at least from where I was sitting, not a lot of nods or hands. Maybe that felt like we were all dumb, but maybe he had a good nose for realizing he had just referenced something obscure, and that’s why he never stopped to ask us if we knew something that we could all nod to. I’m fearful of the workload for this class; I gotta get on top of the reading early, but I’m very interested in the process.

On Saturday morning, I go back to the same classroom for Enterprise Software Development. I’ve kind of avoided taking all the computer programming track classes, because the first one, which I took the first class term, was frankly awful and that same professor teaches almost all of the classes… except this one. As a more classically trained geek… that is to say, I learned programming at my father’s knee, literally, and then figured out everything else mostly just by finding challenges and then muddling my way at them… I’m always painfully aware that someday, if I become a coder in any larger organization, I’ll be a much less good programmer than I am today, just because I’ll suddenly have to abide by the rules that let people work together effectively – practices designed to make less-good coders more effective and organizations less completely dependent on one person (the apocryphal story is that IBM’s early operating system programming was crippled when one genius programmer, who could generate literally millions of lines of code that worked beautifully but only made sense to him, simply disappeared one day). So learning the language and a bit about those tools will help me at least change how I program to make it more compatible with those sorts of standards. Just in case. I expect this to be an easy class since it’s buttressing existing skills… a far cry from trying to start from scratch learning wireless networking technologies last term, or biotechnology the term before.

Finally, our last class each weekend is computational finance – a class for which we all get MATLAB to install on our laptops. Ask somebody who’s been in the class before, and you invariably get the same answer – one of the best classes they’ve taken in the program, but hard as hell, they say. Of course, they seem in general to overstate the difficulty of quantitative classes (and no, mom, it’s not just me saying that, but also my classmates; it may just be that we have a more math-capable group this year). It actually looks a lot like a great culmination to the program – an intersection of our earlier classes in finance, decision models, and statistics. The first class session was a bit slow, with a very interesting 30-45 minutes in the middle but the rest bogged down a bit… not with difficulty but with painstaking algebraic rigor. The prof began at one end of the chalkboard, filled it column by column, then got back to the beginning and started again, and spoke in a medium-quiet monotone the whole time. IT’S A MATH CLASS.

So… tired after the long weekend, confused by daylight savings, and way behind today on chores and errands that I have time to run for the first time in a long time (I’m about to drive a car for the first time in several weeks). I’ll shamelessly point out that I also plan to find a relief organization to donate to for the Japan disaster and I encourage others to do so. Anyway, that’s it for What Greg Learned and I’ll be back (at the latest) in a few weeks with more! Thanks!

Breathless excitement? Check. A little bit of ego? Check. Book recommendation? Check and check. The clock is ticking on Japan, but first we have a big weekend to reflect on to close out Term #5. Full transcript… uh, planned script… after the break.

Oh boy oh boy. It’s another edition of What Greg Learned, and one positively dripping with excitement. I am less than one week from standing in Japan, surrounded three-hundred and sixty degrees by Japanese things, and my nerves are on high alert, mostly from excitement. But before we can go forward with that, it’s time to reflect, as I always do… and I mean always… on what just happened on my journey through businessy-engineery continuing education.

This was the end of the fifth term. Six more class sessions to go and I’m done with the program! Sure, those will take three months, but if senioritis is supposed to kick in, I suppose it’s late. Luckily, last term and the coming term seem among the strongest I’ve seen in content, so that really helps. The thing about this weekend, as the endpoint, is that all classes – including many that I didn’t take but certainly all of the ones I did – culminated in big projects or papers this class. Now, on reflection, maybe that intersection is surprising, and what should be surprising is that this is a somewhat unique occurance. I think it comes down to the high volume of project-based classes this term: many classes really seemed geared around a project that would propose a venture or concept, from Human-Computer Interaction to Photonics to Robotics to 4G Wireless, New Venture Initiation, Marketing Strategy… I only took two of all those classes but had classmates in all of them. Add on the final for Supply Chain Management, plus presentations about the industries and companies for the Japan trip, and obviously we were in for a fun weekend. It’s meant I had to curtail even my World of Warcraft playing this past week to prepare. Horrors!

Let’s cover things in chronological order. Robotics, we knew, was a bit pushed for time – the professor is the director of the robotics lab and it sounds like he’s been deeply engaged in meetings with DARPA and other people regarding new grants and things so he had to cut last class short and add a lunch session this final class, during which we were to present our final project, a robot initiative. Class on Friday started with him bursting into the room and telling us all to come downstairs for a quick demonstration of the quad-rotor robot. That’s a little robotic helicopter thing, with four rotors, natch, and they’ve done a lot of work on using them to autonomously map and explore buildings. We got to sit in the auditorium as one of these little guys powered up and whirred around the room, and ask the grad student some questions. So that was neat- the lab here is rapidly becoming renowned for its work on quad-rotors so it was nice to see the goods.

We went back and had a guest presentation from a technical figure at iRobot, the company that makes Roomba. However, he didn’t really talk about their residential stuff, because they also make Packbot, a strategic robot used in military and crimefighting scenarios – right now there are a bunch of these things deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they can be used, as an example, to examine potential IEDs so that if something blows up it’s a robot and not a person that it takes with it. They’re playing with other form factors, including one that’s light enough to be carried into battle and intuitive enough to control so that your common grunt can do it, rather than a specialized army engineer. Some neat things.

Then, off to another room for lunch and presentations. My robot idea, plucked right from real life needs, was a robotic weeder that could patrol a garden and keep it weed-free. I designed it to look like a tiny little farm tractor, called it the Tracta, and thought about how you make one of these things work without it going crazy and mauling your garlic plants. It’d take a lot of change in garden design, and it’d be useless in raised bed gardening… so long run, I doubt it’s commercially viable until much smarter technology is out. But it was fun to think about and the prof liked all the presentations quite a bit.

Anyway, from there to the Supply Chain final. That was maybe the low point of the weekend for me, since I discovered upon arriving that I had, in my panic to be ready for all the presentations, woefully messed up on being ready for the test. In particular, I was without my little one-page list of concepts and equations that a classmate had sent around and which seemed like it’d be handy. I even printed it, but it is, in fact, still sitting right here next to my computer. D’oh! But worse yet, I left my calculator in my other bag. So I didn’t have a calculator on a very math-heavy test. What I did have was a lot of scratch paper, so it was a fun exercise in frantic long-hand division and multiplication. I’m sure I made some bad arithmetic mistakes, but I did my best to mentally check each answer for reasonableness. I’ve done well enough in the rest of the class, and expect my classmates to make their share of conceptual errors in the test, that I’m not overly worried, but it was quite the brain workout.

Having emerged from that, I had a surprising lull… it was a few hours before the Japan meeting/dinner and it was an incredibly beautiful non-February-esque late afternoon. I found a little table out of the way of all the student traffic (as you can imagine, on the first spring-like Friday afternoon of the year, the kids were getting rowdy), and settled in to finish off Michael Lewis’s The Big Short. I won’t lie… somewhere in me there’s a bit of brain horrified that my spare time entertainment consisted of reading about drama in the world of high finance. But it’s a great book.

Anyway. Japan meeting was catered by some city caterer that had… at least a vague sense of Japanese food, even if they couldn’t be bothered to dig up chopsticks. There are four groups that we had formed into, each presenting between, say, two and seven companies. My group was that seven – as I mentioned, we had a great group and I was a slavedriver because I’m super motivated, and I had even pushed hard on the “practice your presentation and cut out the fat” line. Honestly, we were a freakin’ machine, with great slides and a lot of good information. Other groups were editing at the last second, rambling on without any direction, and so on – probably nobody took it as seriously as I did (and, honestly, why should they?) but I was proud of my group, and also proud to know that with that presentation, to some degree, almost all the “group captaining” is over. There will be some sort of deliverable after the trip, I think, and the whole thing is a graded class. I’ll talk a bit more about Japan in a bit, because I want to figure out how I reflect on that.

Nonetheless, at 9 pm, when that was all over, my day wasn’t yet over. I had to go find my group for the next day’s presentation so we could get ready. So I was in a conference room until I hopped a train around 11 to come home. The last presentation, of course, was for my remaining class, the one on 4G wireless. The X Factor here was that the prof had invited a fellow from AT&T’s innovation lab to listen in and evaluate the projects (and he was seriously evaluating them with an eye towards what it would look like to move forward with them, since that’s what the AT&T innovation lab is about… incubating projects for a short time to see what can happen). Our project was interesting because it’s an enabling technology that I personally believe a lot of the cool stuff of mobile technology needs – a wearable camera/screen for “Augmented Reality” apps. It’s pretty freakin’ cyberpunk, and honestly when people refer to that as a downside of it, I get a bit confused, but nonetheless, I think the group did well, and the AT&T guy even asked, “So… how much would you guys need to create a prototype?” I’m not really aching to get into the prototype hardware business (and, to tell the truth, doing so under connection with a provider would be a bad business idea). But it’s neat to hear somebody be interested in it.

Next term, of course, isn’t that far away (and will be only a week away when I get back from Japan… that’s right, I may need to do homework IN JAPAN if there’s anything I can carry or buy a Kindle version of). I’m taking Enterprise Software Development, which actually covers a big hole in my programming knowledge in a way that my Software Engineering class simply didn’t. Also, I had the frustration of having to choose between Data Mining and R&D Management, and settled on the R&D. Add in Strategic Management and that’s a whole lot of process management and organizational structure to handle. Finally, Computational Finance is drawing a huge crowd, and I’m eager for that. I have a student version of MATLAB now and we’ll see what we can do with it. Getting back briefly to something I’ve mentioned before, this aspect of the program – quantitative financial analysis, operations… it’s the geeky side of business school and thus exactly what they should be throwing in spades at this student audience of engineers. It’s where these guys should be able to shine, at least the smart ones, and it tickles an itch that should be in any good engneer’s brain.

So, getting back to Japan before I close out. I’d be surprised if I managed to write in from Japan, but it’s all just online so I could. Since my audience mostly knows me, I’m likely to rely on Facebook to shout out now and then. I’m taking a camera and, like with any trip, a journal so I can reflect. I’m considering a twitter feed, but it’s functionally identical to facebook, so I don’t really see the point of muddying that up.

That’s all I’ve got! Thanks for listening to What Greg Learned! See you… when I see you!

Editorial note: I screw up my last sentence of Japanese. Gomen.

A Japanese man never says no! It’s a super extra-ooshi episode of everybody’s favorite reflection on business education. This was a pretty exciting weekend, hope you enjoy the podcast! My script after the break (I wasn’t too bad about it this time!)

What Greg Learned 28
Hajimemashite! Watashi no namae wa Guregori desu. Kore wa “What Guregu Learned” desu. Sumimasen, ima wa Eigo o hanashimasu.

Hey, term 5 is winding down, with just one more class to go. I had a long weekend this time around, thanks to additional meetings for our trip to Japan, which is terrifyingly only three weeks away! I still have some more bits and pieces to buy for the trip – a new dress shirt or two, some nice dress socks, and so on, and of course I’m not spending nearly as much time in Rosetta Stone as I wish I would, but at least I’m spending more time saying I should. I also need to contact some of our hosts for more information.

So both Friday and Saturday nights we had additional two-hour sessions for a crash course in Japanese culture, history, ettiquette, business practice, language, geography… in other words, too much to do in two two-hour sessions. It was a nice moment to see the basic language stuff that the presenter wanted to show and to see how far beyond it I am. I also liked the chance to connect a few dots and learn some of the history, and it was fun to hear some of the business coaching for Americans dealing with Japanese. (Note: I’m not going to write out the story here that I’ll likely drop into while recording this).

Aside from all that, I also had all three classes this weekend. Let’s switch things up and go backwards. The last class of my weekend is always the 4G Wireless technology class, and we had a special guest, a very high placed technology guy from Research in Motion, or RIM, the Blackberry people. He’s been very involved time and again in standards creation, and these days RIM is even more into that because the lion’s share of their business is in Europe and Asia and global-focused, which tend to be markets in which standards really matter. Unfortunately, despite having a wealth of experience and knowledge, the guy wasn’t the most engaging speaker, largely because he had trouble tuning himself to the group. Some topics kept him almost word-for-word verbatim saying what the professor had said in the previous four sessions, which was boring, and sometimes he’d drop into shop talk, making jokes that were so inside-baseball that nobody in the room really got what he was saying. He’d deliver a line like “And then they were trying to do HDCSP, but they took it from 3300 to 4 and I don’t know what they were doing.” And the phrasing would sound like he was expecting a laugh or at least a chuckle, but all he got was a room full of blank stares as we tried to figure out what there were 3300 of. I was the least attentive I’ve been for any lecture this term. On the plus side, that same day I got back some of my assignments and the in-class pop quiz and actually am pleasantly surprised on how well I did. So that’s good.

The middle class is always Supply Chain. We had a special little treat this week, as we met in the computer lab to do the “Root Beer game”. In the root beer game, students get put into groups of 4 and to some degree you shouldn’t even know who you’re grouped with. The four players on a team get assigned one of four roles in a supply chain for root beer: the factory where it’s made, the distributor who bottles it, the wholesaler that holds it in distribution centers, and the retailer that puts it on shelves. There’s a time delay for new orders to travel up the chain, and time delay for the shipments to come down, and of course consumer demand fluctuates somewhat randomly. There’s a cost for having too much root beer, and a bigger cost for falling short. I was the retailer, and oddly enough the prof decided to show us all who was on what team, and I have to admit… I saw my team and cringed a bit. Things were not going to be pretty. As we started, I realized I should try to put some data into Excel so I could follow the rules for ordering. A few rounds of the game later I realized I wasn’t even keeping track of the most important data. So my model improved over time, and while I was worried sometimes that it may not work out, I just stuck with it. And as the game progressed and we occasionally looked at overall cost (which is what we were measuring as our “score”), my group started out a little behind first place and then, by the second break, we were majorly outperforming other groups – by the end we had half the cost of our nearest competitor and a fifth of the cost of the worst group. Something went really right. So the rest of the team did a great job, but in comparing our experience to others, the big difference is that there was never a panic. I held to my plan and had faith my suppliers would get my goods to me eventually, and they did, so I never had to try to adjust my order to compensate (which would have just messed up their world). In other groups, somebody would put in a huge order to try to spur a supplier who hadn’t been able to fulfill earlier orders… but what does that huge order do? It just creates waste. As one despondent student asked at the end, “Um, if I’m not wrong, we just finished taking a class in Supply Chain, and yet 4 of 5 groups just failed miserably at this simulation.” The professor smiled and just said that he’s seen 5 out of 5 fail at times. The thing is, like any academic discipline, it’s hard to take what you learn and stand there in the field and rely on what your brain and training tell you to do, rather than what your gut says. That’s why pilots need simulators. That’s why doctors go through years of residencies and stuff. You need that extra time, feeling the emotions and strains and tensions of real situations and reflecting on the experience to connect the dry classroom training to the actual steps and actions taken on the scene. Which is all a grandiose way of saying my team rocked.

Finally, or first, I guess, since this is backwards, our robots class was very different too, as we had a guest speaker talking about haptics. Haptics is actually a poorly defined field but has to do with physically moving stuff and directly acting on that motion, either as input or output. So the vibration of a phone is haptics. There’s a number of controllers that look like a ball held up in air by a bunch of robot arms so that you can move the ball around in 3-d space and it’ll track your motion and provide resistance. The challenge of course is that there’s no way to model a full haptic reality using just machines, but unlike other interfaces, it turns out we have more challenge abstracting touch – it’s really hard to fool it because it depends not only on pressure on your skin but also texture, temperature, the position of your body. This makes it a tough research field because solving one aspect isn’t all that commercially exciting unless you figure out the rest too. Nonetheless, we then went to visit her lab and got demos of various products and then visited some of the other robots labs, including where the PR-2 is kept. The PR-2 is a huge humanoid robot (don’t ask how much it’s worth) that has been awarded to a dozen or so schools for research. After we were shown the basic functions of it, I think I annoyed the grad students by asking, “Well, what are you actually doing with it? Just taking pictures of this room?” since that’s what they had shown us so far. They huffed a bit about how what they do is figure out algorithms for basic actions, like moving your arms thorugh a crowded space without hitting anything, so that other (the implication was, less intellectually pure) places then just slapped their libraries together into end actions. Out of curiosity, I looked up the videos of those end actions and understood the attitude – there are videos of some other lab’s PR-2 shooting pool and fetching beers for the researchers. So of course here at the serious intellectual robot school, we turn our noses up at the party robot lab.

Oh my that’s a lot of talkin’. Let’s call that enough. One more class session, and it’s all presentations and finals and stuff, and then… JAPAN! Thanks for listening!

The transcript means nothing! It’s total anarchy this week on What Greg Learned, as I treat my carefully-written script as a rough set of guidelines and fling preparation to the wind… well, ok, I guess I do that every week. The transcript (for what it’s worth) is after the break….

Heya! We’re back, and it’s time once again to find out What Greg Learned. I’m Greg, and this continues to be my digitized journal of what it’s been like to go through continuing education in managing technology.

We’re coming up to crunch time in the term, with two classes left. The final class session will have two presentations/papers due and an actual final. Plus an additional presentation for the Japan trip. And I know others in my cohort taking other classes have other things due the same time. So it’s gonna be a heck of a time. Both of my projects involve coming up with venture/invention sorts of ideas.

Anyway, the usual format of this blog is to iterate my way through the classes, but I’m not going to this week. It was another good weekend – this has easily been the best term of the program for me – but not really in any specific new ways. Both my wireless class and robotics featured guest speakers (and both classes plan to continue doing so) so we’re getting other perspectives on the technology, and in this we’re getting a much better perspective on how the tech classes in this program were designed to work. Real industry perspectives, feedback from people who’ve been involved at the forefront of the technologies. The shame and the pity is how this peek at how the program should work is happening now at the two-thirds-done point, but I suppose it can’t be helped.

Supply chain continues to be a class that makes me realize how much I enjoy operations. There’s something very satisfying about looking at all the pieces of how you order raw materials and move product to distribution centers and retailers, forecast demand, and to realizing just how powerful these really basic infrastructure parts of running a business really are. We explored an interesting angle this week about sustainability in the supply chain, with a particular focus on Wal-mart. Quietly, Wal-mart’s been pushing the green aspect of their operations to reduce energy usage and do other ecologically sound practices, and really they’re doing it for primarily business reasons – maybe the best proof you can come up with that the false dichotomy between ecology and economy is just a red herring… those who believe the two are mutually exclusive are hurting whatever their cause is, be it making money or fighting climate change.

The Japan trip’s shaping up. I’ve bought some suits and a business card holder… and really I’m trying not to think about just how much this trip is going to cost, all told, but it’s all worth it. Starting next class session we’ll have a lot of extra meetings, and justifiably so… we’re down to about a month! I’m still next to myself with excitement. All somebody has to do is mention, say, Shinjuku Station and I grin like a madman.

Well, that’s really about all I have this week. Funny how there’s less to talk about in a good term. But maybe there’ll be more next time around on What Greg Learned! See ya!