11 (Other) Things You Learn In B-School

This is the second part of a four part series “Things You Learn At Business School”. See the first part here.

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Dear Dad,

Summer semester was fun. I “learned” how to price bonds and got really good at networking. And by networking I mean partying on boats. I learned the stock market has been mired in the driftless Summer doldrums. So, my smart investor friends bail when the Dow crests at 10,500 and come aboard again when the Euro/U.S. housing market/jobless claims anchor sinks it back down to 9500. My classmates also wonder if we’ll see a double-dip in a) the U.S. economy (33% chance) and b) in my GPA (significantly higher).

Here are eleven other things I learned last semester:

1. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. You have to sit through at least 30 minutes of a consulting firm workshop to get it.

2. When interviewing try and go first (The Primacy Effect) or last (The Recency Effect). And never come without prepared questions (The Not Gonna Get Hired Effect).



3. Invest in Brazil for the long-term. Sure, it’s dangerous (See: Janeiro, Rio de).Yes, we’ve all seen “City Of God”, and the country ranks in the top 20 in homicide rate. For all of Lulu’s charm, you still can’t trust what the government reports. Despite all this, Brazil is ready to samba. The country holds 20% of the world’s fresh water supply and has been dubbed the “Saudi Arabia of ethanol”. Brazil was largely insulated from the Great Recession because of its diverse investments. The nation’s largest oil company Petrobras (PBR) just uncovered the second-largest oil discovery in 20 years deep beneath the Atlantic. And Brazil’s rickety infrastructure is due for a major make-over with the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics on the way.

4. At recruiting efforts, go to odd-numbered groups of 1, 3 or 5 people so you couple up. When the conversation starts to stall, go with “I must rescue my friend” or “I should mingle.” Not “Peace out, homie!”

5. The over/under on hearing the word “synergy” on any given class day is 11.

6. The next time someone says, “I’m not a business man. I’m a business, man.” Take your business to a ma’am.

7. Every business school ethics case is the exact same. All of ours come from Harvard Business School (which is ironic in its own right). And they all go something like this:

INTRO: ____, a senior managing director at [Insert Top Wall Street Firm Here] reflected on the last six months at the company from his desk. A sudden breeze cooled his brow.

NEXT 5-7 PAGES: Company and employee background you barely skim.

DILEMMA: The star-hire is a rainmaker who wants a promotion but his brusque personality infuriates the rest of the office. Do you fire him?

CONCLUSION: You do. (See also: Terrell Owens’ brief tenure with the Dallas Cowboys)

EXHIBITS: 4 pages of charts and tables you don’t read.

8. There are two ways to negotiate: distributive and integrative. Distributive is the bad, I-win-you-lose, zero-sum game kind. Integrative negotiation is the good, we-both-win-more, grow-the-pie kind.



In Hollywood movie terms, distributive negotiation is the there-can-only-be-one “Highlander” variety. Integrative bargaining is the feel-good “Sex & The City” negotiation. Sure Miranda and Samantha sometimes have their differences, but at the end of the day the girls all work together to find Mr. Right.

In reality, every negotiation is a mix of the two. And I would love to see that movie. (Even if Michael Bay directs it.)

9. Princeton researchers pegged the price of happiness at $75,000 a year. Make more than that and the stress tends to outweigh the material gain. In other words, my future banker friends are highly masochistic.

10. Every Professor belittles Little’s Law. It’s a formula—L = ?W—that tells you how long you have to wait in line. In English, the number of customers (L) equals the average arrival rate (?) multiplied by the average waiting time (W).

a) This is invariably followed by the Professor scoffing, “Wow, Mr. Little! Great formula to be remembered by.”

b) Little’s Law is not applicable at the DMV.

11. Law school and med school kids, don’t hate because you have more work, graduate later, and our dean is funnier than your dean:

Don’t Sleep So Much - You Might Kick The Bucket

In hindsight, my high school Algebra teacher may have been certifiably insane. The first day of class he wandered off on a tangent about a Medieval prince who loved his sleep. This prince loved his sleep so much he decided to sleep five minutes longer every night: 8 hours, 8 hours 5 minutes, 8 hours 10 minutes … until he slept over 24 hours. Then, he died. Class dismissed, Professor continued. Don’t forget the quiz on polynomial expressions this Thursday.

I asked around, and no one has ever heard of this prince’s cautionary tale. I did, however, find a bizarre news story about 15-year old British girl named Louisa Ball. My friends sleep through half of every class (but still get better grades). And I’ve been known to sleep through flights. But Louisa sleeps through entire family vacations. Louisa is stricken with a rare disease called Kleine-Levin Syndrome, dubbed Sleeping Beauty Disease, that makes her sleep for weeks. Her longest snooze was 13 straight days. Baffled doctors can’t stop it, so Louisa’s parents must her wake up once a day so she can eat and use the bathroom.

In spite of Louisa’s affliction, people today sleep less than ever before. According to an American Cancer Society study, Americans slept 8 hours a night in 1960. Today? 6.7 hours. That’s a groggy 15% drop in sleep within 50 years—despite NBC’s late-night lineup’s best efforts. In our defense, our grandparents/parents didn’t have the following distractions: sensationalized 24-7 news-cycles, Red Bull, the Internet, and late-night SportsCenter reruns. National Geographic pegged the costs of our national “sleep debt” at $15 billion dollars in health care expenses and up to $50 billion in lost productivity (or Syria’s nominal GDP).

As usual, our grandparents were right. Eight is the correct answer for number of sleep hours. Sleep more than that and you are more likely to die sooner. A University of California San Diego psychiatry study found “sleeping more than 7 to 8 hours per day has been consistently associated with increased mortality.” But beware of sample bias here. The guy who sleeps 11 hours a night is more likely to be lazier and/or unhealthier.

Sleep less than 8 hours and you are more likely to be a) cranky and b) fat. Scientists observed a hormonal correlation between sleep deprivation and obesity. The hormone ghreline triggers your appetite and is found in higher concentrations in sleep-deprived people. Another hormone, leptin, lets your body know when it’s full and was seen in much lower levels in the under-slept.

I know what you’re probably thinking, Kirstie Alley, and we’re not buying it. It’s not your lack of sleep that’s the problem. It’s the lack of occasional light jogging. And you just eat too much.

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It is the only time in my life I will ever pity Leonardo DiCaprio. Sure, he is Hollywood’s Golden Boy, and, at 35, he’s decades younger than George Clooney and Tom Hanks. And, oh yeah, he’s on-and-off with Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue cover-model Bar Refaeli.



But poor, poor Leo. You can just picture him preparing for “Inception”. Waking up from his Egyptian 1000-thread-count sheets, sending Bar off to her latest Turks & Caicos photo shoot, and then hunkering down to read every book on dreaming and sleep he could find. There was just one problem. Leo would not be in a normal dream world. He’d be in director Christopher Nolan’s. And Christopher Nolan spent the last decade architecting it.

“This was Chris Nolan’s dream world, and he had his own set of rules and his own structure to it,” Leo lamented. “So I needed to understand what that Rubik’s Cube was in his mind. It took months to tap into how my character directly related to these different levels of the subconscious.” Leo somehow pulled it off after recycling his jangled “Shutter Island” acting jitters, but Christopher Nolan was the real star. At last.

You see, Christopher Nolan wanted to make “Inception” a decade ago. But he realized to create the movie on the scale and grandeur it deserved he would have to cut his teeth with a couple For-Them studio blockbusters. So Nolan bided his time. He aced “Batman Returns”, then ho-hum shattered the opening weekend box office record with “Dark Knight”, and he finally had his For-Him movie. And Youtube had a new mash-up favorite:



Nolan briefly speculated “Inception” could eclipse “Avatar” as the highest grossing movie of all time. He wisely backed off. Scoreboard: “Avatar” $2.75 billion, “Inception” $655 million. But “Avatar” is a mere kid’s movie by comparison. There are two types of movies. There are movies you look at (“Avatar”, any flick with Megan Fox) and then there are movies you watch. “Inception” is the rare blockbuster that satisfies both. A masterpiece whose mind-bending, CGI Penrose stairs are girdered by Descartesian and Jungian pillars.

“Inception” is more fact than science-fiction. You can influence your dreams. Christopher Nolan experimented with designing his own dreams since he was 16. It’s called “dream incubation”, and novelists do it all the time to inspire narrative break-throughs. In a one week-long study, college students stared at homework problems framed on their night-stands before going to sleep. 50% of the students dreamed about the problems and 25% solved them. Yet 100% of the students were believed to be lousy conversationalists at the Saturday football game.

Group dreaming is still the stuff of misty Shaman legend. But dreams within dreams (within dreams, within dreams) do occur—though they were found in less than 1% of studied sleepers. False awakenings in different layer dreams have also been observed. And it’s true. You never remember how your dream starts, because your short-term memory does not convert into long-term memory during deep REM dream sleep.

Leo wasn’t just acting when he said what feels likes hours in your dream span only seconds in real time because of intense neural brain activity. When you die, it’s been reported the brain experiences up to 12 minutes of this same neural activity. This could feel like years, decades, even millennia. Couldn’t this endless dream, then, be forever?

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Warning: The views in the following section are not endorsed by the Department of Health or the Department of Education. Results may vary.

When Bill Clinton was at Georgetown, a saner professor told him great people conditioned themselves to sleep 4-5 hours a night. The simple reason being: you get more done. Bill Clinton applied the theory in his dorm room that night and remembered it well during his famous all-night pizza meetings at the White House. (Warning #2: The Bill Clinton Sleep Schedule is not to be confused with the Bill Clinton Sleeping Around Schedule.)

When I was on a high school tour, the scruffy tour guide mused you can attain two of three things at school. You can 1) learn a lot, 2) meet interesting people, and/or 3) get great sleep. I never saw the kid again. I didn’t even get into the school. But I never forgot his tip. And I don’t understand why anyone would pick any combination other than 1) and 2).

Stay up late, my high school buddy, always said. Just stay up late. And the less compelling the reason, the better. “Mad Men” marathon at 12:27 AM? Watch. A random Spice Girls reunion concert on a school night? Go. The most intriguing conversations happen then. These are the times when the “remember the time…” stories are minted. “Those were the days” adults reminisce wistfully about school. And those Raman Noodle-fueled late-nights? Those are the hours. I can’t tell you anything about my high school papers except they probably had “needs more development” and B+ scrawled in red ink on them. But I recall every vivid detail of our spontaneous sledding trip the night before finals.

After a while, my buddy said, you almost hate sleep. You see those restless, toss-and-turn hours as the most wasted hours of all. So give me 4 or 5 hours, a shower, and let’s get on with it. Today You grumbles at Yesterday You for a while. You may say something odd in 9 AM Marketing class. But then you remember the impromptu 1:17 AM dance party or the roommate’s spot-on George W. Bush impersonation. You laugh maybe a little too loud to yourself, in maybe a little too packed library or Subway car. Then you sigh: time to prove your worth a damn. Crack the menacing Capital Markets book. And go out and earn tonight.

So that the next morning you can grumble at the blaring alarm clock: not again.

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Amusing Ourselves To Death

   

Via PBH: Huxley Vs. Orwell: Infinite Distractions Or Government Oppression?

When McDonald’s Opened In The Soviet Union

On January 31, 1990, the first McDonald’s opened it doors in the Soviet Union with a restaurant in Moscow after 14 years of navigating Soviet red tape. Over 30,000 Muscovites stood in line for hours to wait the chance to be served McDonald’s.

At the time, the Moscow location was the largest McDonald’s in the world, with seating for over 700 people and capable of serving over 15,000 patrons a day. For political reasons, McDonald’s Canada was responsible for the restaurant, with little input from the U.S. parent company — a wall display within the restaurant shows the Canadian and Soviet flags. To overcome Soviet supply problems, the company creates its own supply chain, including farms and distribution networks, inside the USSR along with a $40 million food processing center in Moscow.

For more on the launch of McDonald’s in the Soviet Union, see the NYTimes: McDonald’s in Moscow: A ‘Bolshoi Mak’, Time: Moscow’s Big Mak Attack, and CBC: Muscovites mad for McDonald’s.

Bonus: see below for a commercial launched by McDonald to celebrate the opening of the Moscow restaurant in 1990:

The Jersey Shore, American Politics, & The Post-Racial Society

President Barack Obama is a liar.

The man entrusted with the ultimate privilege looked the nation in the eye and betrayed each and everyone one of us. In a White House Correspondents’ dinner speech this May, Obama quipped: “[The Jersey Shore-Up provision] reads, ‘The following individuals shall be excluded from the indoor tanning tax within this bill: Snooki, JWOWW, The Situation and House minority leader John Boehner.’”

But fast-forward to this July and the set of “The View”. The hard-hitting tribunal of Joy Behar, Whoopi Goldberg, Elisabeth Hasselbeck & Co. grilled the President on his pop-culture wisdom:



At first, Snooki took the presidential diss in stride, asking “Obama? Is he an athlete?” But Snooki sprung into action after President Obama instituted a 10% tax on tanning beds. “I know he knows who I am,” Snooki told E! News on August 11. “Why did he have to lie and say he didn’t know me? He did say Snooki and JWoww about the tanning stuff and now he doesn’t know who I am? He has to stop lying.”

So there you have it. The President of the United States of America exposed by the … over-exposed DeepTan agent Snooki.

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Once upon a time in a land far, far away (January 2009, Washington D.C.), back when the Jersey Shore was just a rickety Boardwalk New Yorkers scoffed at, back when President Obama vowed to close GITMO in a year, Obama was heralded as our nation’s first post-racial president.

Someone asked Obama a month into his presidency if he thought a lot about the history involved in being the first African-American president. Obama responded, he did… For about a day. Ever since, pundits have criticized Professor-In-Chief Obama for not doing more to advance racial quality. For not having his “teachable moment” on race yet. They are wrong.

Obama Already Had It

Obama’s underdog presidential campaign was a veritable Rorschach test on race in early 21st Century American. The son of a Kenyan father he never knew, the grandson of a white grandmother with stereotypes of her own, Obama campaigned, “in no other country on Earth is my story even possible. But in no other country would Obama have to walk such a racial tight-rope.



Some on the left openly questioned whether he was “black enough”. Some even claimed Hillary Clinton was “blacker” than he was. Meanwhile, others on the right alleged Obama even mentioning his black heritage was reverse racism. NYTimes’ columnist Charles M. Blow opined, to the right the very word “’racism’ has become a weapon … a shotgun blast sprayed wide and loose at all things anti-Obama.”

It was March 2008, and the Chosen One was losing some luster. Hillary Clinton was getting into a rhythm. Youtube clips of the Reverend Jeremiah “GOD DAMN AMERICA!” Wright were going viral. The Reverend, who presided over the Obamas’ wedding and baptized their daughters, now threatened to derail Barack’s entire presidential campaign.

With his back against the wall, the oratory master stepped up to the podium in Philadelphia and delivered the talk of his life. In a speech entitled A More Perfect Union, Obama finally spoke openly about race and what it meant to him. Rev. Wright wasn’t wrong for blasting race in America, Obama mused. Rev. Wright was wrong because he assumed race was static in America. To dismiss Rev. Wright, Obama argued, would convict us of the same crime, “to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.”

Instead, Obama offered a choice. We could continue to treat race “only as spectacle — as we did in the OJ trial — … or as fodder for the nightly news.” Or we could embrace our differences, like adults, end our “racial stalemate” and come together to solve health care, education, and the Iraq War.

Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech was hailed the world over as one of the most frank talks on race Americans had heard in decades. The 38 minute speech was watched 1.2 million times on Youtube within 24 hours, and the New Yorker maintains it ultimately catapulted him into the White House. Alas, another Reverend was not as appreciative.

The Reverend Jesse Jackson

What happened to you, Reverend?

You were one floor down when Martin Luther King Jr. was tragically assassinated in 1968. (Although a) you did later try and claim you were right there at the time of the shooting—contrary to eye-witnesses and photographs; and b) you wore the same blood-splattered turtleneck onto the Today show the following morning in a thinly-veiled publicity stunt.)

You were a legitimate candidate for the Democratic Presidential nominee in 1984 and 1988. The NYTimes even dubbed 1988 the “Year of Jackson”. But then skip to days after Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech two decades later:



The Reverend quickly apologized to Obama, who in the heat of the campaign trail didn’t have time but to graciously accept it. But surely the gaffe still registers with the cerebral Obama. The most troubling part isn’t what Rev. Jesse Jackson said. The most troubling part is if the ordained Baptist minister openly discusses castrating Obama deep in the lion’s den—a FOX News studio—what do you think he talks about back home on his couch?

Jesse Jackson’s heart is unconscionably in the right place, and his role as a Civil Rights pioneer shouldn’t be overlooked. The problem is he often seems to put his personal cause above the greater one. The problem is Jesse Jackson interjects himself into issues in a quest to stay more relevant than right. Like when he assailed Fox’s “Power Rangers” for featuring a White Ranger.



Or more recently, during the LeBron James Sweepstakes. When the Cleveland Cavaliers GM Dan Gilbert railed against LeBron James “taking [his] talents to South Beach”, the Reverend Jesse Jackson responded, “[Gilbert’s] feelings of betrayal personify a slave master mentality. He sees LeBron as a runaway slave.” No, your Reverend. LeBron James is not a runaway slave. Not when he’s leaving Cleveland for a $110.1 million/6 year contract. (He’s just another spoiled superstar who confessed he couldn’t a title with the hand he was dealt.)

Reverend, like it or not, you are the face of the modern day American black rights moment. How can President Obama take your counsel seriously when you rant like that? It’s not possible to lead a meaningful national dialogue on race relations when you just sound so crazy and out-of-touch.

Obama’s Been Kind Of Busy

Full Disclosure: It’s early, but I feel like I’ll be an Obama apologist for the rest of my life. I already think about Obama’s legacy. A lot. He is the first President us Millennials can call our own. Sure he doesn’t know who Snooki is and he just turned 49, but Obama will always be the cool professor who was in on the joke more than he wasn’t. My only hope is history properly appreciates President Obama for who he really is: Black Cinderella.



So it bothers me when critics write off Obama as another Jimmy Carter. President Obama’s achievements to date are the most sweeping since President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society: $787 billion Stimulus package, tobacco regulation, improving America’s image abroad, credit card consumer rights, healthcare reform, tax cuts for the middle class, Wall Street regulation, etc. Not to mention Obama has “kept us safe”—the lone barometer of the George W. Bush Presidency and legacy. The problem, as Senator Christopher Dodd tells it, is “Democrats don’t know how to celebrate.”

That Obama has accomplished all this in spite of a Say No Republican Congress deserves FDR-ian praise. Since Republicans lost Congress during their 2006 midterm “thumpin’”, the party either threatened to use the filibuster or used it 70% of the time. (It was 8% in the LBJ’s day.) Their playbook has one play. Obama is too big to succeed. From the petty (cheering when Chicago didn’t get the Olympics) to the grand (blocking jobless benefits), many Republicans seem to root for President Obama to fail so they look better in November—country be damned in the mean time.

Racial equality isn’t the top priority on Americans’ minds in the wake of the Great Recession and two of the longest wars in our nation’s history. Yet give Obama credit. He selected Eric Holder as the first black Attorney General. He tapped Sonia Sotomayor to become the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice.



Major appointments aside, however, Obama rarely touches the race button. Sure, he toured a Ghana slave fortress with his daughter Sasha, but, by and large, the President just doesn’t do sweeping racial symbols. Instead, President Obama’s modus operandi on race is to just normalize it. Treat it as ho-hum business as usual. When a Harvard professor was arrested by a white cop for trying to break into his own home, Obama handled it like a neighborhood dust-up. He invited them over to the White House for a “Beer Summit”.

Obama knows his work isn’t finished. It’s barely even started. It’s not a post-racial America when the pay gap between white and black men has increased over the last three decades. It’s not an equal America when women are still paid 73 cents on the dollar. It’s not the United States of America when we have Arizona. And it’s not a free America when couples who deeply love each other—no matter their sexual orientation—can’t get married (for the most dubious of reasons).

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Which brings us back to Snooki. You see, like President Obama, the cast of the “Jersey Shore” has been discriminated against. Like Obama, they have been teased because of the color of their skin (day-glow orange). Like Obama, they have been regularly asked to provide identification. But like Obama, they are self-made celebrities who rose from humble means to national prominence through their unique oratorical gifts.

So, in the interest of race relations, President Obama should invite the cast of “Jersey Shore” to the White House for a Ron Ron Juice Summit (a concoction of watermelon, cherries, cranberry juice and vodka always served bare-chested). Both sides have had an ample experience over the past two years dealing with obstructionist haters. With their powers combined, who knows what they can accomplish? You know, besides gym, tan, and laundry…

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This is the second part of a two part series on the Jersey Shore. See the first article, Why The Jersey Shore Is The Smartest Show On TV.