Hi there!

After moving out (see recipe on last post), I have been on the road, driving lots of hours, visiting beautiful places and relaxing a little bit. I have almost no time to blog, as there are many miles to drive in the huge USA. So far, I have been in

• Lake Tahoe, where I swam in frozen water,
• Oregon, including beautiful & trendy Portland. (tip: Go to the restaurant Balvo on 23rd st in the alphabetical district)
• Washington State, and welcoming Seattle, as charming as always.
• Idaho, where I just refueled (the state line in the license plates is Idaho, Famous Potatoes, how uninviting is that?)
• Montana, where I slept and now
• YELLOWSTONE! Amazing wild life (moose, elk, bisons, coyotes, wolfs, black and grizzly bear and more…) and incredible geothermal features like geysers, hot fountains and boiling lakes. The beautiful colors of the water, come from bacteria that thrive in different temperatures. Where water is extremely hot, color is intense blue, and then greenish, then yellow then reddish. Amazing. A must-see, indeed.

In the next month I will fly to other countries, where I will have some more opportunities for blogging. Surprisingly enough, there are very few internet cafes in the USA. If you carry a wifi laptop, you can connect everywhere. Without one, like me, it is almost impossible.

Therefore this blog will see little activity in the next two weeks, but I go south from here, a land full of internet cafes…

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To prepare a good moving, here is a good recipe:

Pick an item and then choose:

• clean it, pack it & ship it…
• or discard it & throw it away…

Repeat with as many items as available at home.
Dear readers, sorry for not writing much, but I am busy packing my stuff and giving closure to my american adventure. Moreover, I am working on getting some holidays organized. More news soon…

It’s 11pm and I just returned home from a delightful nice tapas dinner with three other Bay Area admits. I wanted to organize a meeting with locals before I left the area, and today we went for dinner at Iberia Restaurant (Yes, I chose the place, a small privilege of being the organizer).

We were a very multicultural group, very representative of the international mix of the school. Of the attendance:

• 25% US-American
• 25% Indian
• 25% Chinese
• 25% European

Curiously enough, not that different from the mix at School!

I’ve had a great time exchanging details about our backgrounds, sharing summer plans, when to install in London, logistic details, moving and how to make the most of the MBA… Very interesting conversation.

Some data points I want to share with you:

• Out of the four, I have been the one to leave my company the earliest. Some are planning to work until mid August.
• Two of us attended the same LBS presentation. We agreed that the presentation per se was OK, but we were highly impressed by
• the number of alumni present. And all voluntarily, they love their school!
• the interaction with the alumni. Talking with them you get the real feeling for the school, and there was a very so many of them at the San Francisco event that we had plenty of people to talk to! It was great.
• how candid and to the point were the admissions officers: No flowers about the school was about nor how B-school was about making a revolution, making everyone happy, being angelical or other enlightening stuff. They were clear on how school is about career advancement and successful business. I think here the US-Europe cultural difference plays a huge role. More on that when I get philosophical.
• Two of us had very intense interviews with lots of challenging and demanding questions which we secretly enjoyed (Thanks M!) (I personally felt very respected and taken care of when Mr.M. had thoroughly studied my application and proved so by questioning me on the weakest spots). The two others had more relaxed enjoyable conversations.
• All of us work in high-tech related jobs (well… we all live and work in Silicon Valley)
• Two single, one married and one married with a child.

Very smart and interesting people, very engaging conversation,… I can not wait to meet the rest of my future classmates!

I am excited about the ethics class in B-School. I belive it is a key subject for making a positive difference through quality management, but I am not so sure how it is going to be taught. In some schools, the focus on ethics has been increased in the last years, but the approach is still very sesame street like:

Bert: “Hi Girls and Boys! Today we are going to learn the differnce between good and evil! But before that I have a question: Who wants to be evil?”.

“Not me!” the audience responds.

Ernie: “Ok, good! Now do a paper on the subject, you will get graded and let’s move on to the finance class!”

You know what I am talking about. Not a single corporate crook answered “Yes I want to be evil!” in his B-school class and got an E on his paper. They all wanted to do good at that time. However, they ended up all famous for the wrong reasons.

I want to see the approach that the ethic class takes, I have higher expectations for London Business School! (for one thing, MBA tuition is way higher than the price tag for the full set of Sesame Street DVDs).

Back to the topic of this post: Now that we are getting some more Enron News, I have a suggestion for my beloved school ethics class. Can anyone forward it to the responsible professor? Here it goes: Do an on-site ethics class at the nearest prison, active or historic. I am not kidding!

My rationale: My own visits to one of San Francisco’s top attractions, Alcatraz [W]. I have visited it every time a friend comes to town. The place is amazing and the views on a sunny day are priceless, and you can recreate Clint Eastwood trying to escape or Sean Connery & Nicolas Cage trying to break in (depending on you age). On top of that, a visit to Alcatraz gets me thinking (WOW! A nice attraction that induces reflection, a wonder of the World!). The visit of the facilities and the audio guide provide an idea on how life was for the inmates, and imagining myself staying there, with limited movements, limited interaction with others, limited everything, it is extremely depressing. After a few minutes visiting, I get anxious and I want to get the hell out! I do not want to imagine what serving sentence in any prison feels like! The thing I would lack the most, I realized, would be social interaction.

Imprisonment has many goals, depending on who you ask: Punishment, rehabilitation, isolation of dangerous people, state repression, and last but not least, serve as a deterrent! That could be used in any ethics class.

While I firmly believe that ethical behavior should come from personal rectitude, no sensible person would deny that social pressure contributes to proper conduct or that having a clear picture of the consequences of severe wrongdoings also helps. Visiting alcatraz gives a very powerful gut feeling, avoid prison at any cost!

Therefore, in the next ethics course, do visit a prison! And if your nearest BSchool is not offering the day trip, do yourself a favour, visit a prison and reflect on what would life be inside that place.

I believe that such an excercise can make anyone wonder whether an improper action is worth it, if crime pays. Maybe, if the University of Missouri or the University of Houston had organised a similar day trip back in the 1960’s, Kenneth Lay would have made diferent actions as Enron CEO. Don’t you think so?

Thanks to Angel Angie (Another 2008 blogger!), I just learned that my friend Karlitos is blogging his London Business School 2008 MBA experience too. I also discovered VJ - An MBA pirate (2008), another future classmate. Check out for a second the links sections on the right: In the London Business School section there are 18 links to blogs as of today, and there are probably some more blogs I do not know about (send me your URL if you read this!).

This week, there is another remarkable blogger from Barcelona, Mr. Tomas Toro who apparently is very happy about relocating to London. I am looking forward to meeting him.

For a small class like ours, 18 blogs is a surprisingly high number, isn’t it? Other schools at League of MBA Bloggers have smaller numbers of blogs per 100 students (London 18/6= 3 blogs per 100 student). If it were because of the weather, Boston (Harvard is 0.4 b/100s) and Paris (Insead 0.1b/100s) schools would have similar numbers. If it is not the weather,… maybe it is in the water, or in the air…
Regardless of the reasons of this high blog concentration, I thought that a club of London Business School bloggers might be in order. I do not know exactly what to do with that club, other than exchanging links, but I had a fun time creating the logo and the name. If you like it, please feel free to use it, I invite all other fellow bloggers to put it in their websites!

Have a good weekend!

Today is my last day. I have handed over my projects, ordered my folders and done all the paperwork. I will miss my friends, working here, the Google cafeteria food, and the feeling of creating GDP and doing some real work.

Now the student life abysm opens in front of me…

… so I’d better run, because time is flying by and I have lots of things to do. Fun student things, you know, like selling my car and many other items, packing and moving, buying plane tickets and cleaning my appartment before the checkout inspection.

After leaving my job, the real fun starts!