Turn on the Vision

Some have their life's visions emerge over decades of self-study; some have them appear in a blinding flash of inspiration; still others develop their visions by self-deprivation and trials.

In my case, it's a task for a POM session with the ever-fresh Nicholas Bate. Which is why I'm sitting at my desk at 11.30pm on a Friday surrounded by bits of paper featuring sketches of mountains, deserts, buildings, and question marks.

I'm not cynical about such sessions. Like all self-help resources, it's useful in proportion to the effort you put into it. The trouble is, I'm not sure what my 'vision' is, or why it should be singular. What could my vision involve?

It could involve women. I mean, I've had only six actual dates since arriving on campus, and two of those were undergrads towards whom I found myself looking at more fatherly than lustfully. (OK, so my twenties are a distant memory, but frankly I was expecting a little more action than this.) But somehow I just don't crave any 'life partner'; I'm a lone wolf by nature, and I can't imagine myself part of a duo. People ain't my vision.

Or it could be fatalist, like 1984's message to Winston: "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on the human face - forever." But I'm just not THAT much of a cynic: the pleasure of life for me is usually enough to sear away the endless pain of existence, even when you hurt all the time.

What about hitting the road again? If I could write my ideal job title it'd just be 'Adventurer' (benefits are excellent, but the salary's terrible.) The trouble with visions is that they have to lead somewhere, have an outcome. A jungle or desert just won't work as a vision, even if unfamiliar skies are the places I've been happiest under.

I tried the concrete, too: a Modernist building of a single room a kilometre wide, with an endless pool reaching to a distant sunrise. Almost working. Space, hope, and opportunity.

Then I realised: what led me here to WBS was that I needed to turn my back on my vision. I'd been obsessed for decades with keeping my options open, never getting in too deep, never concentrating too narrowly, always having backup plans and other choices. I realised I needed to focus on a single path, at an age where your options for starting over ... start annealing. Time to make choices.

So how about this: create a billion in shareholder value. Note shareholder value, not personal wealth. Whatever companies I approach (and they're all young growths) demonstrate the strategic pathway to a billion in market value, labelled with as many graphs and programmes and discounted cash flow projections as needed. Then find its NPV and show I'd be worth the risk of employing to do it.

High risk, high adventure, and a goal worth striving for.

And maybe, as its outcome, that hillside villa in Nafplio, looking out over the harbour as the sun sets on the hilltop castle. One of maybe a dozen places around the world where, just for a while, I found peace. Twelve or so places I'm scared to visit again in case the inner peace doesn't come back.

So that's my vision: to have attained the course goals (degree certificate, knowledge acquisition, personal development, and career setup) that'll bring me the peace of mind to go back there without fear. To return to Nafplio, when I'm ready to go.

I'M BAAAAAACKKKKKK!!!!!

I made it for a swim today. A quick klom at the Sports Centre, on second attempt after being phoned into a meeting just as I reached it at 12.38pm. Finally got there at 2.30.

Now, that may not seem like anything to write home about. But I'm a naturally active person and I've been sitting on my ass for two months almost solidly. (Actually, the ass itself is somewhat less than solid as a result.)

What you don't notice is how much 'physical' people deteriorate in that time. So brief, yet of such violence against the self that against it the decay of centuries is nothing.

Tonight I feel GREAT, buzzing with energy and inner strength; that half hour struggling along swim lanes has somehow relit the furnace. My flatmates have commented on how different I look. I'm 'myself' again. It's good to be back.

In two months hunched over a laptop or lecture desk, my shoulders have lost something like 6cm in lateral dimensions. My arms have shrunk to puny sticks; ruddy skin faded to blotchy whey. There's a perceptible beergut, and I've spent every day tired for as long as I can remember. I'm a shadow of my former self.

What I forgot was: this isn't me. I'm not a milquetoast academic; I'm an adventurer. My home is barrelling across deserts in a 4WD or grokking the electric neon night of a New Asia city, not the overcooked softness of the academic world. I like it here, but I don't belong here.

I see so many of them, young professors and postdocs old before their time; 35-year old men going on 80. They're not part of my worldview, and maybe that's why I dropped out of school at 16.

But for a few brief weeks, bound up in the hysteria of an MBA first term, I nearly became one. Soft. Rounded. Sunk in the custardy gloop of a pleasant, rarified life of thinking and writing.

And it nearly killed me. Only last week I went blotto for a full 24 hours, exhausted by the sitting and talking instead of moving and acting.

Ha. Almost got me.

But now the endorphins are awakening from their Autumnal slumber. Racing into my system. Electrifying my being. Bringing me back to life. I'm fizzing again.

You got me, but - not - quite.

I'm back.

The horrors of the CV book

WBS produces a CV book every year for a select few companies that recruit MBAs, and it's scary to see just how high the standard of other people in my cohort is. I mean, every other page is full of 'Top 5 people in Class', 'No. 1 in University', and other such stuff.

Lots of people think MBAs are arrogant. In fact, we're the last class of people capable of being arrogant, since we're among so many people many of whom are, statistically speaking, FAR BETTER THAN US all the time. Being an MBA is humbling, not ennobling. You learn to realise just how good other people are.

For instance, I've been called smug. I'm not smug. I was pretty sure I didn't act smug or look smug.

Until I opened the CV book and saw the unforunate photo chosen. And then Damascene moment -

"Holy shit, I AM a smug bastard!"

Time for a hot bath and some self-reflection.

Finding my passion

I've got to get passionate about something.

I'm a bit worried about 'passion'; everyone I speak to talks about how important it is, finding your core one or whatever.

But I don't seem to have a passion. The trouble with liking everything is that you don't love anything. And that's the problem I'm faced with right now.

Everything in life's just bobbing along at a pleasantly positive ebb.

I could go adventuring again, just head off on yet another years-long journey to find something worthwhile after I graduate. But I did that for a decade plus. And I didn't get anywhere except older.

Where's my passion? How do I find it?

Week 9 begins

OK, so 2am fire alarms are an occupational hazard when you're living in a postgrad hall, but that doesn't make it any easier to drag your ass out of bed when you've only been asleep an hour. It's entertaining seeing what people 'really' look like without the armour of daytime clothing, though.

Odd to think that this is the last 'taught' week of the first term; just a revision week next (which I sorely need, Discounted Cash Flow still being a mystery to me) and then a week of final exams. It's been quite a journey.

OK, WHO......

..... SET OFF THE BASTARD FIRE ALARM WHEN I'VE ONLY BEEN IN BED HALF A RAZZAMUZZINBULLAWANKING HOUR AFTER PULLING A LATE ONE?????!!!!!!

Can't beat the feeling

Yeesssss!!! My Syndicate's had a good weekend: after a LOT of hours in the Learning Grid and bashing together text and facts, we've broken the back of 2 major first-term assignments as of five minutes ago. (It's 11pm and I started work today, a Sunday, at 8.15am; yesterday was little better.)

As tradition requires, I perform the MBA dance of victory.

(Let's see, was it the LEFT hand doing the screwing-in-a-lightbulb move, or the right?)

And then groan. Because next week I've got to start serious revision for the end of term exams; there's another Operations essay to do, plus POM project work, and a large Economics research project I've barely begun. Bummer.

Opening up, with rueful undertones

The week just ending can be summed up in these three bullet points:

- The highs are extremely high
- The lows are awfully low
- I hate chickpeas.

Today I'm volunteering at an MBA Open Day, where they open up the business school to prospective MBAs. Amazingly, I realise I've only been here two months to the day - Warwick was the last of my MBA applications, almost an afterthought after receiving two great offers previously - and it's only five months since I first saw the place. But today I'm on the other side of the Q&A session.

And being in this hot seat is harder than I thought. I'm here to answer their questions about being an MBA student, but I'm actually bursting to tell them EVERYTHING about WBS. The beautifully cool new Modernist building; the smarts of the cohort I already think of as family; the elegant way the course modules lock into each other conceptually; the sheer intensity of the experience, like the team party I attended last night and felt completely relaxed at for the first time in months. (Thanks, CR & co!)

But this isn't what these guys need to know; they'll learn this stuff after they enrol. Today they want reassurance that an MBA's a good idea for them, how to fight their way through the thicket of electives, what POM is all about. I'm a resource, not a player. So I have to control myself, which is hard. (Cheerleading for Warwick would look suspicious, as if I'm being paid to be there, so I don't.) But the experience is enjoyable: in the business school that's a second home, chatting to people and maybe helping them, exchanging a couple of hours of study for a bit of people stuff.

After all, on balance I'm having a GREAT time; different to anything I've done before, radical highs and appalling lows, but rarely dull.

Hence the chickpeas.

They feed you at WBS events, and I stuffed myself. So all I'm having for dinner is a chickpea salad from CostGouger. One of those things you buy when you really can't think of anything else. I HATE chickpeas. And even more, I hate life hitting a flat line, especially after a week of wonderful highs (the Heronbank dinner) and black lows (Wednesday night, just before I took Thursday off feeling sick as a dog.)

Tonight I'm in my room, studying fitfully, eating a REALLY DULL DINNER and generally feeling bored out of my skull. This isn't what life should be about. Especially MY life.

But at least I learned one important fact about WBS. Above the front entrance of the building is a circular outcrop on the first floor, one of those little architectural oddities that adds a little spice, and I've often wondered what was in it. The Q&A session today took place inside it, and I learned it's the Dean's private meeting room. Totally circular, kitted out in blue, it's a room designed to impress, and it does. Cool.

See what I mean?

THIS is what I mean. Email just received. I take ONE DAY OFF feeling as sick as a dog, missing a single lecture, and this is what I get:

"The main thing is that we roundly blamed you for being absent as you were our spoeksman, in addition to Xxxx, for the group exercise and as rest of us had not botherred to do it we were blaming you for not turning up!!"

HA!

Bit surprised by yesterday

Hmmm, sometimes you look at a blog and think, 'Did I really write that?" Bitter and twisted and shot through with venom. And it's come out today in a lousy head. I need to unplug for a while.

Getting drunk as a skunk

The trouble with being an (im)mature student is that student life gets magnified. You're over 30, you're beyond teenage irresponsibility; therefore your sense of irresponsibility gets bigger and funnier, and the relationships involved just get MORE INTENSE, not less significant.

In my 83-strong cohort there are already 6 identified couples, some of which involve previously and currently marrieds, and there's a lesbian coupling in there too. (Which isn't, incidentally, the wildest rumour.) Us 30somethings are hotter than the horniest teenagers when you put us in the right environment.

Sometimes, you just have to let go. I've taken 11 calls tonight and I'm fucking sick of the phone. I'm tired of being the agony uncle, tired, tired tired.

Slamming poetry

I've competed in a few poetry slams back in London, usually zonked on more than one bottle of wine: it just works better that way. The point of a slam isn't to create great poetry, it's just to get energy out, keep the meter flowing smoothly while someone else is doing the same thing three metres away with a different audience, concentration and delivery above the sweat. I'm okay at it, and entertaining even when I'm not.

But I don't usually WRITE poetry, and I need to write some tonight, after some ideas scribbled at lunchtime glinted potential. Yes, I NEED to do it; the particular reasons driving this activity are important. But on the page - where it'll last for some time, not the shouted seconds of verbal delivery - putting the words together is a Hard Problem.

The main trouble to anyone schooled in the UK when writing poetry: not sounding like a bloody Victorian.

I mean, the urge to write in the kind of English you see in Yeats and Keats is overwhelming. See a swan and want to write about it? You are ABSOLUTELY GUARANTEED to see the following UTTER SHIT splatter across the paper like a burst pustule:

"Lo! Sweet Monarch of the riverbank... wherefore art thou goest this morn?"

What the FUCK?!!! This is 2007, fool wannabe! If it's indeed a swan, then in 2007 the swan is a bad mo'fo that hangs in the riverbank 'hood trippin' mean or something; "Monarchs" haven't had a look-in to that metaphor since about 1854. Yet this voice - the voice of 'serious' poetry you learned as a teenager - still rings in your ears when you're trying to put decent iambic pentameter together.

What's worse, after several hours of putting my subconscious onto it I've actually got a decent subject and some cool assonance, and I've filled several pages of testpaper. (Poems should always be handwritten.)

Hope I'm not in for yet another 2am night at my desk, particularly with about a dozen assignments due. I can't take much more of this.

The Warwick Take-One-for-the-Team Society

A notice has appeared on the Student Union message board: "CHARITY SPEED DATING". I know what speed dating is - hell, most girls who date me want it to be over as quickly as possible - but for charity?

Perhaps 'Charity Speed Dating' is where you agree to date the fat bird with glasses who can't get a date - i.e. dating as an act of charity. Yes, that must be it.

Dream country

Tonight in Warwick it is almost snowing.

It's been raining all day, without stopping for lunch, and in the last hour the rain's turned to sloppy white flakes not far from winter-wonderland if you really stretch the point. You don't see snow in mid November in London, a scant few latitudinal rings south, and it's marvellous to think there's a chance of a white morning in my strange temporary midlands home.

Haven't got much done in the academic department, but it's been a great weekend. Some chance to relax after the last fortnight's midterms and project presentations; nothing so urgent it can't be left one more day. Went at a stack of paperwork and organised it into neat attackable plastic files, one a day for the next week.

I also got out. First run in months, through sheets of sleet and near-zero temperatures.

It was barely 5km out and back, but it was still a run, even if I took a halfway break to hack up goofballs after so many months out of a regular tri routine. It was surprisingly painful, the kind of rusty-lunged tang that feels like your teeth are bleeding into your stomach through your root canals, but it reminded me just how good it'll be to be back in shape. I'm nowhere near peak capabilities, but I now know I'll get there.

There's something else going on, too. Something special. But that's more than enough reasons for joy for one blog.

That was some hangover

OK, I've been under the influence a few times, but to be so wankered you don't notice that a crocodile's got your head in its jaws?

Sounds like another perfect occasion for that Norwegian-aliens line from the art-house classic 'Dude, Where's my Car?' - "Whoa. You vere really vasted last night!"

Fresh and Easy to... what?

Organisational Behaviour and Market Analysis teach us that very small things, reported in anecdotes and trivia, can indicate fundamental problems with a company's strategy. And I think this quote might well be the one that kills Tesco's American ambitions.

To British ears, Fresh & Easy sounds like an Americanised version of Fresh & Wild, a famous London wholefoods supermarket. But Stateside it appears to conjure up a somewhat less appetising image...

Those clean white lines again

I've discovered why I like the WBS building. It's because it reminds me of the house in London I did up! On the left is the WBS stairwell; on the right is a collage of the stairwell I smoothed and painted a couple of years back.

The four food groups

I'm starting to like working evenings at WBS. The building's so fit-for-purpose it makes my heart soar, and the weather outside is amazing: crisp and cold without being damp. Feels like home.

Of course, having a presentation tomorrow with only a CostGouger sandwich for company doesn't help. At least I had the foresight to bring in a 250ml bottle of wine, some crisps and a pork pie too. What a feast next to my PowerPoint.

Despite yesterday's Dragon's-Den exercise falling somewhat flat (the Dragons ripped into 4 groups out of 5, and when it came to me the crit was directed at me as an individual: what really grated was the way she said she was 'holding back'. What on earth for? I had creative directors practically dangle me out of windows when I was younger; nobody WBS can rope in is anywhere near capable of getting under my skin.) Midterms went fine, even the dodgy Accounting one. Combined with meeting a truly extraordinary person recently, I'm pretty much content tonight. Sometimes the best things in life are right under your nose.

Losing my mind

AAARGH!! I get up at 5.30am to polish a presentation before a lecture this morning, then get suited and booted and head for school at 9... only to discover there's NO DAMN LECTURE so we can prepare for the big presentations this afternoon, and I've got four hours to 'use productively' before standing in front of the WBS Dragon's Den and about forty of my cohort. DOUBLE AAARGH!

Everybody's down in the dumps

I mentioned to a lecturer yesterday that the MBA cohort is hard against it: I'm getting lots of messages with an undertone of exhaustion, lots of sob stories in the Facebook 'Is' box, half the class miserable and the whole of it weary with that deep-down fatigue you get from days without end.

He laughed, and said this continues to at least New Year.

MBAs have a reputation as being the hardest-working students in the University, and it's well-deserved.

I'm suffering the fatigue too. I haven't quite had the horrorshow 4am nights in the 'grid some Syndicates are reporting, but then I've been 'winging' the reading a bit; probably covered less than 10% of the textbooks, surviving on my native wit and incisive mind (HA!) during assignments. And of course the writing parts are easier for me; most people here speak English as a second or third language.

But still - whoa, I'm tired, the kind of tired that isn't scrubbed away by sleep. Got to stay awake and anchored in a high-energy state, just until the end of the big presentations this week.

I am Robin, the New Driver

There's a really bad teen movie I somehow remember: about some guy who failed High School's summer trip to France (that's a PUNISHMENT?) where the trip somehow gets tied up with secret agent subterfuge. At intervals along their journey, their bus driver keeps stepping off and being 'replaced' with the ominous words "I am Pierre (or whatever.) The new driver."

Well, that's sort of what's happened on the Accounting module.

A vast, shambling hulk of a man, not long for this earth, febrile bulk of sagging flesh somehow retaining mobility. Has appeared. His vast body slumps and stumbles around the stage, presence without authority, full of pathos.

(Accounting midterm was seriously screwed; have the MBA programme bosses heard of this, and ensured he 'met with an accident' or something? Hey, remaining on the world's top MBA lists is a difficult business, and I wouldn't be surprised if they occasionally resorted to a little cloak-and-dagger. Is the previous Accounting guy resting dismembered in a Warwickshire field somewhere, 'whacked' for ruining the rep of the Warwick MBA? I'm almost afraid to email him and find out, lest I find myself on WBS's hit list for 'knowing too much'.)

This guy could have been the inspiration for Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein'. More reconstructed Victorian nightmare than man, no discernable gap 'twist head and body; a mushy expanse of near-pyramidical shoulders to midsection; spindly legs all cloaked in frayed cotton and badly-reheeled shoes. A veritable chimera of corporate finance procedures.

So: we've killed off the principal lecturer, and we've got this guy instead.

And actually, he's quite good. I'm starting to enjoy Accounting again.

Swimming in data

Database design isn't really that difficult. All you need is the wisdom of Solomon, a photographic memory, a mind like a steel trap, and about a millennium of free time.

Which is why I'm at my desk at 11pm on a Sunday, and Mercy from down the corridor is amazed when she knocks on my door asking to borrow a textbook.

Well, I do have to do a BIT of paid work now and again here at Warwick U, and db specs are precisely the sort of thing I'm good at: that killer combination of detailed ideas and textual communication. Gathering data from different sources, hefting it around to grok its size and shape, seeing how different colours and textures of data might fit together, and how big the holes in the surface must be to allow all the pieces to fit together. Then telling someone how to do it.

The goal: that once all these pieces are in place, you can see the full story of the data in whatever summarised form you want just by looking across it from different angles.

And very soon, after about four hours of continuous thought, I'll have condensed the output into a single email. Which with luck will earn me a couple of K later this month.

Time for a bath.

Take a deep breath. OK, forget the 'deep' part. Just...

I'm actually going to do it. I'm going to skip a lecture.

Skipping lectures is not something I do, OK? I'm pretty sure I'm the only person in the cohort who's attended EVERY SINGLE LECTURE so far, including the optional evening ones. My feeling is that there-might-just-be-something in even the least relevant or worst delivered lecture, and if there is I don't want to miss it.

Even after a 2.30am night at my desk, I don't miss lectures.

Even in the POM week with the main project due on Monday for presentation Wednesday, I don't miss lectures.

Even in a week where the half-day of open time on Wednesdays has been cancelled and I'm even shorter of time than usual, I DON'T SKIP LECTURES.

Got that? The bit about me not being a lecture-skipping person? OK.

After all... if they've scheduled a WHOLE DAY OF LECTURES on a single subject... it must be a REALLY REALLY IMPORTANT SUBJECT. It's on the timetable: 'Global Leadership in a Modern World'. They haven't pre-distributed slides either.

I struggle bleary-eyed into WBS. Global Leadership. Sounds great. I look forward to a full day of hearing about world leaders, the interface between government and business, captains of industry and titans of commerce. Who's the guest speaker? Branson? Steve Jobs?

As I descend the steps of the lecture hall, I see the horrendous PowerPoint slide that says it all. From thence on, I descend the remaining steps in a daze of blood-boiling anguish.

We've been conned.

Yes, it's another bloody diversity session!

I feel the blood drain from my head, and enter my seat starting to shake.

OK, Worth, get a grip. You can do this. It's only an hour and a half to the coffee break. Calm yourself. Bring your heartbeat back down. Forget that you're in for yet another session of being told how very, very different everyone is, driving a wedge between cultures so these 'diversity consultants' can continue raking in the green.

And what's worse, the lecturer isn't a bad person. Sure, she's got that utterly self-centred sense of her own great importance that all 'diversity consultants' have, but that doesn't prevent her being a nice person; she's friendly, engaging, and presents well. This makes it harder. At least a bad presenter can be laughed at or sympathised with.

This is the worst imaginable situation. Worse than I'd ever feared. Wasn't diversity sort of done? I sat through it, I seethed, I zipped my mouth throughout 88,000 PowerPoint slides on all those really important factors that separate us. I did my time. And now - sneaking in through the back entrance - it's all happening again.

Breathe. I can't breathe. I've got to breathe.

There are a few chances for fun; when she asks where we work, one wag shouts out 'Halliburton!' It's a scene from Kafka. I suck it in.

I'm shivering. Every nerve is alight; I'm wound tighter than a watch spring. My heart's hammering at 180. My throat's a dustbowl.

But I don't skip lectures. This is fundamental, a basic part of my makeup. How can I skip this one?

Shuddering. I can't stop shuddering. Something primeaval's happening here.

But I don't want to bring her party down. This British-born woman of Pakistani extraction (see, she's got ME doing it already! Categorising people according to what makes them different rather than what draws us together!) is not a bad person. And that gives me a justification.

If it were all about me, I'd stay in the lecture, suffer in silence. But this is now about her. I don't want to rain on her parade, and if I stay here any longer I'm going to explode. This thing's out of my hands now. The only option for me is to make like the shepherds**. I now have a reason to leave. But how?

Got to calm myself. Get into the zone. Find my power animal. Find my energy squirrel, or friendly wombat, or supportively non-judgmental duckbilled fucking platypus or whatever.

Need to think. Plan. Execute.

The lights go down for a video. I'm a front-row person, but can I do it? Just escape under cover of darkness? All together now: whistle the theme tune from 'The Great Escape'...

Too late. Some fat bloke finishes a song and the lights go up. The slides roll by. In the brief snatches between our presenter expatiating her experiences as an ethnic minority come the questions. In accordance with prophecy, they're carefully engineered to elicit precisely the response she wants. (I call this the "Have you stopped beating your wife, Mr President?" style of questioning.)

It gets worse: she's putting words into the audience's mouths. One guy mentions how the senior people in his company were all of a certain nationality, and she LOVES this. "So if you're not in the ******* gang, you can't get to the top"... on a point about whether men need flexible working hours, she's off again "So, for football you mean.."

OK, far too late it's time for coffee. She asks another loaded question: 10 or 15 minutes? (The break is normally 30.) Eventually, enough voices are raised in support of half an hour she is forced to concede.

And I'm pretty sure I actually leave scorch marks as I race out.

What is it about this subject? The way it holds organisations in such thrall? More to the point, why do the Diversity Consultants themselves think they're actually doing any good? Overemphasising all these really quite minor differences between races and cultures can only bring anguish, the same anguish I'm feeling now.

An hour later, and my heart's still pounding.

**Get the flock out of here.

Stones awaaaaaaay

Dear me. Time Management this morning, Stress Management this afternoon. I've so little time for all this I'm getting stressed.

Stress Management Guy needs a 'volunteer', which in this MBA cohort tends to mean me, so up I go. There's a jar of pebbles and ten rocks, each with something written on it: spirituality, relationships, career, money and so on. The exercise illustrates that you can't get all the big important stuff into your 'jar' when there are lots of itty bitty things blocking it up.

OK, spirituality goes to the bottom of the jar; not into that crap. Relationships too, with a sideways glance at a certain individual in the third row. It's already getting difficult to get the big rocks into the jar, so I try a bit more enthusiastically, twisting the rocks around and shaking the jar a bit to loosen up the pebbles.

Certain first-year physics principles dictate that the jar should tip over, scattering about a thousand pebbles over the lecture hall floor.

Well... you know me.

Of course, some wag notes that this method actually creates enough space in the jar to fit all my 'big stuff' in. I'm thinking laterally! I'm outside the box!

In fact, I'm so far outside the box, it's kind of scary.

Tesco wins this year

OK, it happened: the first overt marketing approach by one of my retail haunts using Christmas. Today's spam from Tesco Direct is headlined "Get ready for Christmas!!!" In today's marketing world November 6th isn't too bad I suppose - slightly better than last year's mid-October marketers trying it on.

Introspective: second half blues

This week's the pivot point of the first term of my degree, and I'm crashing a bit. The excitement's worn off, but more to the point, the energy these new relationships are taking to maintain has been sucked out of me a bit. I'm not naturally a team player but I've made a huge effort to work within the class/syndicate structures; it's been new, different, hugely enjoyable, but... exhausting. Think I need to kick back for a day or two. At least this week doesn't involve any quant or textbooks stuff; it's POM week, Practice of Management, WBS's core 'soft skills' course about leadership and management.

At least it's a reflection of the school that even feeling a bit blue, there's no place I'd rather be right now.

Fireworks Night

Guy Fawkes Night at Kenilworth Castle!

I love fireworks. Even in a jet-set world of billion-dollar Hollywood and the Internet, the simple pleasures of a cold November night in a muddy field, watching rocketfuls of coloured powder explode across the sky, never fade. The castle - which I once visited on a school trip and sort-of remember - makes a great backdrop.

But I spend the evening strangely depressed. Because the fireworks display just reminds me of what Britain's become: a nation strangled by bureaucratic box-ticking, suffocated by red tape, yellow with cowardice and risk aversion, and Health-and-Safetied to death.

Ooooooh, Health and Safety Executives, What Have You Done To My Fireworks Night?

As a kid, I remember walking right up to the bonfire as it blazed, getting my hair singed and flesh reddened. I remember walking wild across fields with torches, no parents allowed, boys' little adventures. I remember bangs so loud they shook the earth.

Yet at Kenilworth, the bonfire is roped off 50m away. There's not a single bang loud enough to make you blink. Sparklers are banned, replaced by soft and cuddly lightbands. And, unbelievably, even smoking (outdoors in a damp field) is banned as a fire hazard.

This insiduous infantilisation of British society has further detriment, because Round Table Kenilworth organises this event for charity. To comply with regulations, how much extra now goes on ambulance and fire cover instead of to the charities they support? How many people won't be there next year, just because the suffocating circles of box-ticking yes-men turned a *awesome* spectacle into something merely nice?

Risk and danger are there to be embraced, not Health-and-Safetied away. In risk and danger lie competition and opportunity. These evil little public servants are engineering a disaffected society of safety-first, mollycoddled, milquetoast wimps who don't know what real life is like.

Hell, even Branson's been afflicted. See what he's saying about Virgin Galactic? He's saying nobody will fly until it's perfectly safe; that safety is his paramount concern. Here's what he SHOULD be saying:

"People of Earth - this is dangerous. You're going into space, in a big metal tube filled with inflammable materials. This is NOT a 747. It's risky, dangerous, and there is a POSSIBILITY YOU MIGHT DIE.

Now, doesn't that sound EXCITING?"

Let's start putting the risk back.

MBAs at play

Google cuts both ways - one friend on the MBA course has had to go heavy on robots.txt to cut the big G out of her blog. (Googling her brought up "M**** holds a giant mug of beer at Oktoberfest!" as the first entry - not the sort of thing you want MBA recruiters to see.)

Things like this are why I'm NOT going to blog about the post-midterms MBA party on Friday, and will NOT be posting the photo of B** with his 'little friend'. And as for that little business of Bessie the Inflatable Sheep... completely out of the question.

The Boston Matrix of choosing electives

I'm having a problem with my electives.

Choosing electives should be fun: a total of 6 from a list of 30-odd. The idea is you build your own MBA beyond the core modules depending on what your interests and ambitions are.

Warwick's system for choosing electives is about as fair as it can be given finite resources; 2 from a list of 5 in the Spring Term (next), then a further 4 from 25 or so during the Summer, some courses repeating to minimise clashes. (Summer term's going to be fun: instead of the 30-hour courses spread over a term, the Summer options cram each elective course into a single week so those lesser mortals doing the part-time and distance learning MBA courses can join the fray.) With a decade of experience in load balancing and demand management, the calendar clashes aren't creating too many problems.

That is, unless your interests and ambitions are as weird as mine.

It's possible to draw a 3D Boston Matrix for the activity. (A Boston Matrix is one of those quartered squares management consultants love, with two axes of high-low letting you categorise things to match them with resources.) A 3D version extends the matrix into the Z-axis: imagine a cube made up of eight smaller cubes.

My cube's front face contains axes of 'interesting' and 'established', with the third axis being 'relevance to intended career.'

The 'interesting' axis is easy: stuff I find fun. And there are plenty of elective courses on things like complex adaptive systems, organisational behaviour and the like. But such courses often score low on the 'established' axis, because they're young fields still bedding into business life. An ecological viewpoint of management may be interesting, but the course material will be out of date next year. The fluffier subjects, however interesting, are the first to be crossed off the list for me.

While the two 'big' courses I want to take - Management Accounting and Corporate Finance - are both established disciplines that'll still be relevant in decades to come. Not so interesting to me, but to share a boardroom with the investment banking types I tend to work for I need to know it.

(Unfortunately, I have to make a choice, because I can't do both and still cover the Marketing Strategy I want to counter the accusations that I'm too much of a marcom/tactical marketing person.) Big choice to make there. I could drop Marketing Strategy - but it'd be a bad idea to drop something that score high on all three scales, even if I'll know a fair bit of it already.

However, taking care of this clash in the Spring Term at least gives me some leeway for the one-week crammers in Summer; maybe I'll do Investment & Risk Analysis for fun. It's about time I learned what a 'derivative' is. Oops, that requires Corp Finance - time for iteration 13...

A meeting with Sir Humphrey

Midterms are over! And yet, glutton for punishment that I am, I choose to attend a WBS event featuring the ex-head of Britain's Civil Service (Lord Turnball) rather than head down Varsity to get wasted with the others. I kill me, I really do.

Lord Andrew Turnball inspires somewhat mixed feelings. The content of his speech - he's been at the centre of many Blair/Brown battles during the last decade, and is one of the best people on earth to ask about what really happened during the Blair era. A real-life Sir Humphrey Appleby from 'Yes Prime Minister'. But his delivery - soft-spoken, reliant on notes, head down and poor projection - fails to keep the room's attention. Which, as a civil servant to the core, he's probably quite pleased about. These guys are all about shrinking into the shadows.

And he's sitting about one metre away from me.

The speech ends, and what I can't believe as Q&A begins is the utter, infinite, unbelievable patience of the man.

There are a lot of local government / civil servant types in the small lecture hall - Warwick Business School offers MPAs in all sorts of public sectory stuff, like local government finance - and once again I'm struck at the behaviour of public sector people, so different to anyone in business.

Yet he lets these strutting posturing nonentities speak, with a benign, tolerant air. Let's face it, this guy mediated the worst bickerings of Blair and Brown; to him, chestbeating academics represent a challenge somewhat equivalent to fighting cockroaches.

Whereas business types will engage in debate and make cutting remarks, parrying and attacking in cut-and-thrust back and forths, civil service types just want to talk. Question and Answer sessions in the public sector aren't about give and take. They're about giving a speech, establishing your political credentials, and if we're all very lucky there might even be a small question at the end of it.

There's one WBS guy embarking on a lengthy oratory worthy of Thucydides, at the end of which there may or may be have been a question; only a rising intonation spurs Lord Turnball to answer. (He correctly surmises the content of his answer isn't important; this is just about giving respect, not answering a question.) Next comes a Sociology person from the University, equally desperate to demonstrate how very, very clever she is. She's about 55, but There Was A Time, and I catch myself checking for a wedding ring (there isn't one.) Two of my MBA pals have just shuffled into the hall: BEHAVE!

Really, it's that bad. I have to keep remembering where I am, or I'd be rolleye'd and drumming on the desk. It's all I can do from spouting my mantra for successful meetings at the congregation: "GET THE F**K ON WITH IT!"

More questions come in from local government types, of the lank-haired, bespectacled indicative type you'd expect. (The people, not the questions.) Why do so many people who work in local government just seem to have... given up? I mean, these are young women and men studying hard to gain higher ed quals; they're not stupid, not are they naturally unattractive, although most are somewhat slablike. These politicians of the future aren't bad people. They're just a little... dull.

I sidle up and introduce myself to Turnball later over the post-speech cocktails, and he turns out to be just as affable in the flesh as at the podium. Like a lot of civil servants intelligent enough to have done other things (and probably made a lot more money, if fewer gongs) he's an interesting character.

While a bit of a marathon after 2 midterm exams today, the evening has been worthwhile: yet another example of just how my life's changed in the last few weeks, largely for the better. And I manage to snaffle a couple of WBS pens on the way out: everything's a bonus.