As you can imagine, the title of this post is not about the London weather forecast. True that yesterday we had snow (as per my previous image posts) and today a cold beautiful weather. But there is no forecast for thunderstorm tomorrow in London. Well, in a way it could be a local weather forecast, for around 14:15 PM.

Sorry if you do not get the point of this post, but it is more of a private joke. I just want to point out that this post is dedicated to one of my few loyal readers and fellow classmate, Toby, who is partially responsible for my academic performance. I have a public announcement:

A big thank you to Toby for all the emails with useful relevant academic information!

As public services go, Toby is way better than the BCC! And above all, a great person and classmate.

And for tomorrow, I am sure that Toby’s people skills, talent and gravitas will help him out through the thunderstorm. I will not be there, I have a meeting somewhere else in the city, but I completely trust he and his judgement.

Ah! The joy of collaborating with great people! The joy of trustful delegation!

I love my stream!

I have added a funny gadget to the blog. On your left, you can see the last search queries that have redirected people to this blog. I find fascinating (and quite voyeuristic) to learn what were people looking after. While I write these lines, users who reached my website through a search engine were looking for...

1. Broader thinking
2. mozilla thunderbird portable installation walk through
3. london sawing & pattern courses
4. mbaers lbs
5. daily increase in daylight hours
6. 12. IRRITAINMENT
7. google job application process
8. leaving google
9. Wiliam James
10. london high tech business school
11. economics discovers its feelings
12. LBS waitlist chances
13. foodstore,london
14. dinged by Stanford Business School
15. london business school admissions

Fascinating, isn’t it?

Dear reader,

Thanks to the ubiquity of my mobile posts, I am going to post some week-in-review detailed information about what goes on in my MBA routine. I hope some of you (prospective, applicants) find it interesting.. There are plenty of gaps, but it will give you an idea about my schedule. And it is from Saturday to Friday, because it was Saturday when I got the idea

• Saturday:

Swimming for 1000m . First time I swim in two months, happy to be able to keep it up. However, I am out of shape and want to get some more speed. Relaxed day, meditating what comes ahead.

• Sunday:

Sunny day, let’s take advantage of it: Walk all over Hyde Park, Chelsea, Battersea Park and back home. About 7.7mi walk. Plan for the week, bc I want to keep up other projects while the MBA starts again, and I want to be able to prioritize accordingly.

• Monday:

Up at 6am. Preparing for classes, because the MBA is on again. First day of classes of 2007. DEO, Discovering Entrepreneurial Opportunities. Interesting concept of “systematically discovering” opportunities. Some homework to be done. Private Equity 101, excellent conference by classmates Sasa and Iliana. A couple of conference calls. Sleeping at 23:00.

• Tuesday:

Up at 6am. Prepare for classes. Finance (Joao is capable to make any topic interesting) and MOB, Managing Organizational Behavior. After a long day, reviewing the goals for the quarter and the things I want to focus more on. Back home for dinner, two chapters of “Yes, minister!” (glorious amazon dvd rentals) and off to bed at 10pm.

• Wednesday:

Up at 5am Preparation for cases early in the morning, cleaning up my inbox. Marketing class, slow paced for my taste, but with an interesting framework at the end. During the break, study group (I love my study group) meeting to organize quarter (this one is going to be tougher than autumn quarter). After class, sandwich lunch with Michael and Tien Lu. Work on other projects all the afternoon in the library, where I bumped into The Divine Miss N after her return. I just guessed it had to be her, and I was right, she is just great. Then moved on to swimming pool, swam 500m. From 4:30pm on, I was at the presentation of the book “Ready, Willing and Able?” by Asa Bjornberg and Nigel Nicholson with Nishant. Some more email at LBS. Then back to home to work on the multitude of assignments due for next week:

• 6 group & individual assignments
• 5 case preparations
• 3 Group Assignments
• 1 Questionnaire

…and buy some groceries. Keep working and have dinner. And discovering the joys of buying groceries online at Tesco. To bed around 23h.

• Thursday

Up at 6am. Work in projects. Go to DRA Decision and Risk Analysis class. Very dynamic and engaging teacher. The takeaway of the day: Never play Russian roulette and use regression analysis wisely. Back to home for lunch, showered along the way (glorious rain from the sky). Lunch and work at projects. Presentation by Ana Patricia Botin, Banesto bank CEO. Interesting to see how a high-powered Spanish executive behaves and addresses (direct, frank, no-nonsense, no apologies, owning the room, strong emotional ownership, normal-to-low voice tone, simple standing with no distracting movements) and her ” Fundación Conocimiento y Desarrollo“:

• The extreme problem in Spanish university system is the complete out of touch with the business world it is. The ” Knowledge and Development Foundation” is helping to bridge the gap and encourage better transfer of knowledge from universities.
• According to Ms.Botin, the first step they are undertaking is to gather data about the situation. Good starting point, but then, what is next?
• Yesterday I read in the news that 2/3 Spanish university students want to become “funcionarios” (public servants with lifelong employment), the opposite of entrepreneurial and ambition. Spain has a big cultural and social problem with the lack of ambition and drive.

after the presentation, discussion about divine and mundane matters with Mr.A and Ms.C, both attending the presentation and then head home. The wind was incredibly strong, but luckily there are no trees on my way home. A little bit of home improvement (bought a new powerful floodlight). Dinner, feeling a little bit exhausted, to bed at 10pm

• Friday:

No classes today. Up at 5am. Work at home in multiple projects. My first UK online shopping gets delivered, just on time. It’s official: I love tesco online .. I will buy more often there, although it requires a little bit of planning, I do not have to carry groceries home. I have pizza for lunch, I feel bloated in the early afternoon. Go to school. I do a mock interview to a friend who wants to work at Google at 3pm. She is good. Meeting with a teacher at 4pm. Work in the library for an hour.

In a couple of hours, I will probably go to Sundowners. Now I just post this. I hope you can gain a more intimate appreciation of what a week means for a MBAer. This was a weird week, because it was the first one in the quarter, so it always demands some adaptation.

If you like this post and want more of this sort of material, leave me a comment.

Image from online sign generator

And I just hope we all can derive some inspiration from Oprah

I saw this video a couple of months ago, and I was looking forward to posting it. This man is a genius, quick wit, inspiring, and even refreshing. In this awesome video, Mr Buffet addresses a class of students, probably in the late 1990s, discussing everything from…

* how to become successful.
* Long Term Capital and leveraging yourself when you shouldn’t.
* the little differences between his lifestyle and the students’ lifestyles (only in travel). * what he likes in businesses.
* what makes Coke special.
* buying stock assuming the market will close for at least 5 years.
* his views on diversification for professional investors.
* how he was lucky to live in a society that rewards capital allocation ability (instead of rice growing skills)
* …and the fact that the market does not care about your feelings

His style is so down to earth, and quite fast. Enjoy it:

(90min video)

Finally, a classic Buffett warning for all my B-School students audience:

“The business schools reward difficult complex behavior more than simple behavior, but simple behavior is more effective.”

The NYT follows the economist on talking about the studies about happiness. In Happiness 101, D.T. Max talks about how some universities in the USA are offering courses on Happines and the impact it has on some of the students.

Some quotes I found enlightening:

The focus of Kashdan’s class that day was the distinction between feeling good, which according to positive psychologists only creates a hunger for more pleasure -they call this syndrome the hedonic treadmill- and doing good, which can lead to lasting happiness. The students had been asked first to do something that gave them pleasure and then to perform an act of selfless kindness. […] In this case, as one student wrote in a summary she submitted to Kashdan, comparing “a day at the spa covered in really expensive French” stuff and “a day of community improvement covered in horse” manure, the smile on the community organizer’s face “beat out the smile on the masseur’s face any day.” That is, she had learned that doing good is good for you.[…] that pleasure isn’t enough. True happiness comes with meaning, he said, and the students agreed.

Some comments about the state of “flow”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of Claremont Graduate University, who has spent years studying “optimal functioning,” or the state of being intensely absorbed in a task, what he calls “flow.” Seligman’s book, “Authentic Happiness,” published in 2002, lays out the field’s fundamental principles and has been translated into nearly 20 languages.

Some stunning correlation between being happy and living longer. It could be concluded that the best for your health apparently is being happy and not smoking (I would argue that there is strong correlation between those two factors too):

Being happier seems to have positive long-term effects not just on well-being but also on health and life span. In one often-cited study, researchers at the University of Kentucky analyzed the essays novices born before 1917 wrote on entering the School Sisters of Notre Dame and correlated them to the nuns’ life spans. They found that 9 out of 10 of the most positive 25 percent of the nuns were still alive at 85, while only one-third of the least positive 25 percent were. Overall, their study showed positive emotions correlated to a 10-year increase in life span, greater even than the differential between smokers and nonsmokers.

And a reference to an intriguing study about how being happier leads to more creative and broader thinking

Barbara Fredrickson of the University of North Carolina was presenting her “broaden and build” […] The first part of her theory stems from a series of experiments that she published in 2005 in which five groups of 20 people each watched short film clips. The clips were meant to elicit negative, positive or neutral emotions. The participants were given a sheet ruled with 20 blank lines and asked to write down what they were feeling. Those who had just had positive emotions induced were able to provide more ideas about what their responses would be than those with either negative or neutral ones. For Fredrickson, this was evidence that positive emotions lead to broader thinking. The participants were also tested for what is called global-local-visual processing. When asked to look at a design on a computer of three squares arranged in a triangle, those who had watched happy-making film clips tended to see the broader pattern -i.e. the triangular pattern- while the angrier subjects saw only the squares. (The neutral ones saw some of each.)

And then the article goes for a couple more pages about the merits and demerits of teaching such classes in colleges, who supports them and who does not. In all, a very enjoyable read, although quite long (8 A4 pages)

The Christmas special of the economist had a very interesting read on happiness. I am so happy I am subscribed. The elaboration about what are fallible memories of pleasure and pain is very insightful. I will think more about it.

Excerpt:Â

Happiness and economics | Economics discovers its feelings | Economist.com

Mr Kahneman, who is not shy of extrapolation, thinks people often choose to repeat experiences that seem better in retrospect than they did at the time. Contrary to Bentham, the “sovereign masters that determine what people will do are not pleasure and pain, but fallible memories of pleasure and pain.” […]

It is easier to forget yourself in some functions than in others, of course. […] This happy state, which Mr Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow”, arises most often in work that stretches a person without defeating him; work that provides “clear goals”, “unambiguous feedback” and a “sense of control”.