The importance of sandwiches

Back in the city! Starting my dissertation project in earnest, I'll now be spending half of each week in London. Feeling fresh. Feeling fast, strong, healthy after nine months of study. Feeling pretty good, in fact.

And all the better for finding a good sandwich shop.

If there's one feature that really 'makes' an office for me, it's the proximity of a good sandwich shop. Not the Pret a Manger chain type, but an actual family-run deli style place, usually run by Italians, where the bread's piled in a basket and they make big bowls of mixed fillings every day or two. There's a great one in - of all places - Surrey Quays shopping centre, where I used to live; the danger in town is that the big chains have squeezed out the independents. Fortunately, the company I'm working with is right next to Sicilian Avenue, one of those London streets with immense character yet without being on the tourist trail, and - paydirt. An Italian-run deli where they greeted me like an old friend on my first visit.

Chicken and bacon with cheese in a ciabatta bun. Sorted.

There Will NOT Be a waterfight! See Below -

And supposedly mature MBAs will definitely NOT be attending.

"Right, as some of you may have heard, the recent attempt to organise "Warwick Water War 08" was cancelled due to "health and safety" issues. The university has said they do not wish for any alternatives. So, furthering on from that particular group, I bring you a warning:

-There will NOT be a waterfight held in warwick to mark the end of the summer term.
-It will especially NOT be held on Monday 16th June.
-It will NOT start at 2PM and end whenever people wish it to.
-It will NOT take place in the field behind Tocil Woods (or anywhere else, subject to change or better ideas), especially in such a place where it will be hard for security to notice anything going on and get to quickly, and where it is easy to run away if any trouble does occur.
-You SHOULD bring your student cards just in case any trouble does start at a waterfight and security asks for them.

I urge you all to forward this warning to as many of your friends as soon as possible, to make them aware of this. Suggestions welcome.

Many Thanks,

;-)

DISCLAIMER: For "Health and Safety" reasons - By joining this group, you agree that if you just so happen to attend any waterfight that just so happens to occur as a result of this group, despite my warnings to the contrary, and you just so happen to somehow inexplicably injure yourself, then you promise not to sue me, or anybody in this group, the student's union or the university, blah blah blah etc."

Bittersweet rush of a year in the classroom

The last roll call!

And just like that - it's gone. The 14 courses of the Warwick MBA, all teaching now finished. Just last assignments and a dissertation to take care over the next couple of months. A final MBA party, hastily arranged, happened last night, and for a few beautiful hours everything was like September again.

And it's been good. My only regret was I wish I'd ... got into it earlier. I don't feel I truly got the hang of studing and learning formally until Term 3; thinking back, terms 1 and 2 were nightmarish, winging it on worry and adrenalin. Trying to give the impression that you know what you're doing takes serious energy, especially when you don't.

But I've learned a few things about myself. I'm still a bad person, but perhaps a bit less bad than I was. And I realise now that I feel most strongly self-actualised when there's something to push against, like deadlines and course timetables and people to let down. Exhausting and depressing it's been at times, but it's also been... awe-inspiring.

Ha ha. Me, who's walked across deserts and sweated through rainforests, awestruck by a concrete college curriculum.

As an outsourced marketing guy I had essentially no obligations beyond turning a great headline, and that's the trouble: working alone breeds megalomania. I spent the previous six years detached from reality. During this year I've gradually started the long trek back.

So: one of the three wishes almost done: build a relationship with the academic world. The other two I'm surprisingly confident about*, too. I came here not to earn a degree, but turn around a life that'd grown stale, and maybe knock off a few of the rough edges I acquired in six years alone.

I'm at the end of nine months of hard work, and all I want to do is go back and do it again differently. But then everyone would.



*Not telling you yet.

Sweet smell of ... something

What a great surprise. Somehow I've passed all the Term 2 exams!

I expected to fail one and possibly three, given that a) I'm crap in exam halls, b) I'm not a finance guy, c) I'd deliberately chosen electives I'd find difficult (finance stuff), and d) I turned out to be the ONLY PERSON in the entire cohort doing FIVE of the bastards last term (three electives absolutely had to be on my list, which meant doing an extra one in Term 2 and one fewer in Term 3.)

And yet I've sailed through the rocky waters of the Examic Ocean. Not even 'weak' passes; only one score came a bit close to the wind, and on the assignments (the parts closest to reality) I've scored plenty, even in the finance stuff I'm no good at. Whooohooo!

Pleased that another quarter of this four-term MBA is done and dusted. But at the same time... a little disconcerted. Shouldn't it have been harder than this?

I expected the numbers stuff to be hard; I don't have a bad head for figures, I just know nothing about maths save an interest in concepts, so the algrebraic bond pricing derivative greek whatever has been hard work for me. And despite being a marketer of 15 years' experience, I haven't done well in ANY of the marketing courses this year.

As 'soft scientists', marketing professors don't really want anyone whose experience was gained in the real world taking their programmes; it offends their sense of how the world ought to be. And it's showed in my results: steady sixtysomethingpercents all the way through. (The stuff I wrote was perfectly valid marketing: it just wasn't THEIR marketing.) But even so, those scores weren't difficult to obtain.

I'd love to say I've been up until 2am every night studying, absorbing texts and case studies and burning away blood in the Learning Grid. But I just haven't. (Except for the 2am mornings in the Learning Grid. But I'm a 'night' person by nature.)

The only genuine problem for me was all the group work an MBA entails; when you've been working as long as I have, some academic's idea of what constitutes 'group working' tends to be both artificial and insultingly juvenile. On the POM course I felt like Kindergarten Cop. And a course packed with representatives of a single nationality didn't help the time management aspect - or indeed the 'diversity' such courses like to trumpet.

(British MBA courses draw most of their cohort from the subcontinent these days, but for me, 'Shout at each other excitedly at high volume until someone listens' isn't ideal academic practice. I came here expecting a degree course in the Western intellectual tradition, yet what I got was... Mumbai Central at rushhour.)

But that's besides the point. I didn't really swot or sweat blood from my forehead.

I just did what I always do. Opened a textbook the day before and... winged it. Which I've always been good at, too good at to stop. Winging it through life, on a feather-thin slice of cash and the ability to string a sentence together. I'm a fraud.

Or maybe I'm just fooling myself, and this is how everyone works.

Today was okay I suppose. If you like second-order derivatives, matrix algebra, and bond pricing equations comingatcha on 120 slides. Ugh.

I am scared to death of my Investments & Risk Management lecturer

I can't believe it's here so fast, but it is. My last module of the Warwick MBA is this week! And the lecturer is already scaring me shitless. What is this, Corporate Finance all over again? Another megabrained lecturer who I'm sure sneaks off at every break just to laugh at my incompetence with financial calculus?

Hell no. It's worse than that.

This one's got such a long CV I can barely believe she's one person. She taught at Princeton, Oxford, and probably the InterGalactic Alliance of Extremely Clever People before Warwick; I've just been down her list of papers and most of them may as well be written in Latin. Whereas the Corporate Finance lecturer had a brain only moderately larger than that of Einstein, this one could have lectured Einstein and probably found reasons not to give him a pass. ("Think you're getting out of that patent office anytime soon, Albert my boy? HUR HUR HUR HUR HUR HUR!!!")

Investment & Risk Management requires Corporate Finance as a grounding, which means it's going to be harder. Looking down the programme (I should possibly have started this more than 24 hours before the first lecture) there are long lists including things like Forwards and Futures, Derivative Swaps, Bond Portfolios (shaken not stirred) and enough greek letters to keep the Athens Post Office busy for months. Just how big IS their alphabet?

There's a whole day on 'Options'. I think my 'option' will be to sit with my head in my hands and sob quietly so she won't ask me questions. Help!

I am quite pleased I could now hold a conversation with a CFA

Copy from an ad for the CFA (Certified Financial Accountant) institute: "If a CFA charterholder sits before you, she or he can evaluate undervalued and overvalued securities, calculate the values of callable bonds and puttable bonds, calculate alpha, calculate financial ratios used by credit analysts, analyze derivatives, alternative investments, taxes, pensions, inventories, and inter-corporate investments."

It's interesting to note that with the right electives, the Warwick MBA teaches you how to do every one of those things.

Database driven life

One of the really impressive things about Warwick University is its databases. Or more to the point, the way its databases connect to the student intranet and let me, slumped in my study bedroom, collect pretty much everything I need to write my assignments and dissertation.

Take just now. An article referenced in one of the readings for a Strategy module caught my eye. It's not in the readings, although it's a seminal article on the globalisation of business from the 1980s. This is probably a test: the course director may have left that article in plain view, referenced in the folder's readings but not actually in the folder as a handout, in order to see which clever buggers would spot it and look it up.

So I look it up. A few clicks and searching into the library, the business section, and a subscription index. A search on author and title. And - within a second - it's there: the full-text article, not in ASCII but an actual scanned page of the Harvard Business Review from 1983, complete with foxy-edged pages and the imprint of someone's pen pressed too hard on a previous page a quarter of a century ago. Brilliant.

In the vastness of the Internet, I inhabit a more tightly-clustered node: an ordered space of indexed scholarship, given shape and form by subscriptions and module structure and the sheer buzz of a campus wired for desseminating knowledge. From my little room here, I'm wrapped in a warm, comforting coccoon of information plus the means to make sense of it.

I'm going to miss this place.

WBS scavengers

Long after nightfall, in the darkened halls of the Business School, the denizens of the MBA programme go hunting.

At intervals impossible to predict, they emerge from their dens, often in packs. Hollow-cheeked and glassy of eye, they seek only one thing: sustenance to carry them through the night's project work.

This is their habitat. They know its every nook and cranny; they have made it their home. They work and play and sleep here. And at this hour, they know where food is to be found.

There's always a company event or presentation evening going on in one of WBS's lounges, and where these people gather, there is prey. The prey: leftover buffet. Sandwiches, cakes, and if you're lucky some of those yakitori things or the chicken pieces with pepper.

It may be in the upstairs lounge, where the central terrace glows eerily in the spring moonlight. Or the hall opposite, where the strange coven known as the Alumni meet for their lunar rituals. Sometimes the MBA wing itself, although in this area the hunters are many and the land overgrazed; but venturing further afield, to the smaller rooms of the 3rd or even 4th floors, can yield rich pickings for the alert hunter.

The prey has been found: a consulting company presenting in a meeting hall. Swiftly and silently, the MBAs take their prey without a struggle, and slink back into the syndicate rooms from whence they came.

Back to skool

Term 3 begins! After a couple of weeks out of the classroom (but still mostly on campus), the last few modules are on the calendar. And it's as if we'd never been away.

This term's modules are differently flavoured: intensive one-week crammers rather than a lecture a week all term, and us fulltimers share them with visiting Modular and Distance Learning MBAs, all of whom seem equally great people. But the format? FOUR shorter lectures a day and project work (case study writeups and a presentation) in the evening, all of which is due this week. Twelve-hour days are the norm this week, plus a couple more hours doing the 'further reading' at home. I'm whacked already.

Other life events are happening apace, too. A work project in from Madrid and another from Paris which is probably going to involve a week over there; I'm also catching lifts to (possibly) two skydiving events over various weekends, to get in a couple of jumps between Strategic Brand and Risk Management modules in May. Not to mention Dreamforce Europe down in town, which I may have to cancel if the French are cool with my day rate. A student can hardly turn that down.

Strategising, skydiving, working for Spain, trips to France, talking to recruiters and visiting technology shows. My life's coming back in a rush.

Building my MBA dissertation literature review

I knew the second half of my MBA would be easier. Still several courses to go, but the main thing now is my consultancy project and dissertation, which I'm doing on the connection between book value and shareholder value - in other words, the part of a firm's value that can be vaguely attributed to 'marketing'. But while a big job of doing stuff then writing about it isn't the hardest thing in the world for me, it's not quite as easy as I first thought.

The reason: it's an academic piece, not an act of copywriting. Which means an important part of the work is finding where it fits into the broader intellectual universe: getting a grip on the landscape delineated by peer-reviewed journals and seeing where your ideas are best built.

It's what one OB lecturer calls a "heading the cricket ball" problem. If your idea of playing cricket is to HEAD the ball being bowled at you, you're unlikely to be regarded as as serious cricketer. Not only that, but your 'innovative approach' wouldn't score you any points, and the whole activity would just give you a headache.

Which for a non-academic raises the question: which papers? Which textbooks? How do I know, when building my reading list, that I'm reading the right stuff?

Fortunately, I've found a shortcut that makes it easy.

One of the resources at WBS (what did researchers ever do without the Internet?) is a comprehensive database with searchable full-text articles from several hundred journals... with the number of citations attached.

Citations, not keywords, are the key concept here. If a paper in my multitude of search terms has been cited a hundred times by other authors, it's a reasonable bet that paper is 'significant', a seminal work in the field. Following the trail of the papers cited in that paper make the method even stronger: most of the people citing that paper will also have read whatever papers it cites. By this process, I can quickly find the 'core' dozen or so papers relevant to the subject I was searching for. Which for a field like mine (brand valuation) tells me precisely where the needles are in the haystack.

In a way, this is doing a 'manual google' - the PageRank algorithm at the heart of Google uses precisely this principle to rank popularity of web pages. Who's linked to you, and how many links you've got. I'm just doing it by hand. Some more whittling down to be done, but in just a day I've got ten papers that seem to lie at the root of this branch of marketing.

Sometimes, I could almost believe I'm smart.

Last of the BHBs

The last Big Honkin' Binder - Investments & Risk Management - has just joined my bookshelf. And that's it, complete in 14 volumes: The Warwick MBA on paper!

Technically, each of these binders has cost £1500 (or at least what they represent: the 14 courses making up the degree.) I wonder how fast the payback will be once I get back to the real world? Not that 'the real world' is a place I've ever spent much time in...

One Hundred Years of MBAitude

Yikes! The MBA qualification is 100 years old today! This calls for a celebration. What shall I do, my Strategic Brand pre-reading chapters or my Strategy & Practice case studies?

What I want to know is, did those first 33 guys at Harvard in 1908 (the class of 1910) have the same trouble with Corporate Finance? Probably yes, although I bet there was less Modelling & Analysis, Excel being somewhat pre-alpha at the time.

Wait a minute - they only studied THREE courses?!! What kind of sleepwalk-through, revise-on-the-bus, wing-it kind of degree is THAT?!!

Despite which, only eight completed the course, a 76% flunk rate. No wonder the Wall Street Crash happened just nine years after they graduated!

Bouncing around campus

I'm having a reasonably fun week. Yes, at last I feel like a student. After last week's exam madness, this week is going like a dream.

A couple of hours in the morning on an assignment; Corporate Finance essay planned, I wander over to the Learning Grid for coffee and reading. Wave to three other wandering MBAs over the course of an hour; a light lunch at Tiko; catch up with email. Some time in the wonderful atrium of University House, finishing last week's Economist.

This is it. La Dolce Vita. The sweet life. Every day should be like this: full of variety, a mix of ideas, interesting things to do with just enough tension to make doing them worthwhile.

The day continues, and I continue with it, drifting around campus from venue to venue. Over to the Arts Centre, for tea with The Most Beautiful Girl In The World. Cross paths with another MBA; back to Lakeside; read-through the Modelling assignment draft, make my comments ready for editing tomorrow. Tasks crossed, even a frustrating hour-long conversation with my bank doesn't dent my sunny disposition.

The bright afternoon turns to crisp evening, recent rain making the air smell fresh and clean as new-mown grass. A burger at Varsity serves as dinner. More waves and chats to three MBAs pleasantly adrift on the post-exam sea. Fix some dates with my Dissertation subject in London next week, confirm a couple of other meetings while I'm there, including a bite the same day with a friend who's leaving, his Warwick term done.

The day's been fairly busy; but unlike the last few months, I've actually got time to do stuff. Nothing's popping up randomly and chaotically, like impromptu group meetings, endless phone conversations, or the aftermath of lectures. The sun's shining, and all is right with the world.

Hail to the BHB

There are a lot of Big Honkin' Binders on the Warwick MBA, but nothing seems to blunt the thrill of opening a new one. And I've just collected another one in prep for Term 3.

Creaking the fresh spine open for the first time offers near-orgasmic excitement. The immensity of readings and pre-readings, the case studies, the structure of tabs and sections and Assessment criteria. Term 3's courses are shared with the part-time MBAs - taught in intensive one-week modules rather than spread over a term - but the binder metaphor thankfully remains as the guiding collective noun of each course, heavy and plasticky and beautiful.

These Big Honkin' Binders are, of course, a major selling point for the Warwick MBA: they're 'giving us something', weight and heft to the knowledge offered. Looking back at the BHBs from Terms 1 and 2, I've made each one mine: covered in Post-Its, notes in margins, filled-in boxes and printouts hole-punched and bound into context by my own hand. These binders are now part of me.

Just as a handwritten letter on 160g watermarked vellum means more than a text message, these binders are worthy containers for the riches of a top MBA, even if much of the course material and interaction happens in electronic form. And I'd bet that even when laptops have the same contrast, clarity, resolution and portability as a sheet of paper, these binders will still be around.

The mainstream life

Looking at my calendar for the next few days. I've got a set number of people to phone each day, various academic assignments to submit to the University, two proposals to write and five suit-and-tie meetings to attend.

How admirable. How conventional. How mainstream.

This whole year at Warwick has basically a single purpose: to push me into the mainstream. That widest streak of life where I've spent so little of mine.

Most professionals are by definition mainstream (I'm looking at the professional class here, of course.) Leave school, attend University, maybe a Masters before a job in finance, law, or consulting. Pair off, build up capital, have children, go into oblivion. That's it. That's the mainstream, and most people are happy there.

Compare this with what's on my CV. Left school (in teens), bummed around North America, fell into copywriting as a way to avoid anything that felt like working for a living, somehow got good enough at it to be named 'one of the world's top 100 creatives' and judge the One Show. A decade of that, then a few more years in London doing marketing plans for all sorts of companies, working my own hours and answerable to no-one. Yet somehow getting those companies better ROI than any big agency. That's a long way from the mainstream.

Trouble is, the mainstream is also where the action is: living on the edge is great, but the jobs and projects that interest me now are happening in mainstream companies with mainstream people. If I'm to continue doing the stuff I like, I need to join a respectable business. And respectable businesses employ respectable people. Mainstream people.

That's ultimately what the Warwick MBA is doing for me: putting a respectable mainstream face on my rather unusual background. As the madness of Term 2 finishes and I start talking to headhunters, it's time to go mainstream.

Post mortem: Strategic Advantage

Executive Summary: hard part's over!

OK, so there are a couple of assignments to do before end March, but the Strategic Advantage exam - two essays, two hours - was a pleasant finish to exam week. Not too rushed, took a five minute holiday in the middle, managed to shoehorn a Porter's Five Forces diagram and the distinctive assets pyramid in there. Had 10 minutes spare at the end so I thought I'd add an Appendix with the Value Chain! And why not. (Appendices are cool.)

And now the first half of my MBA is over bar the resits, oops, I mean bar the shouting. Today is the last day the 80 of us will be together as a cohort, sharing a core of content: from this day forward, we go our separate ways, into diverse electives and project/dissertations.

In some sense, I'm already missing it.

Hands in pockets against the not-yet-Spring weather, I wander the emptying campus of what I've come to know as 'my' university.

University House, a beautiful chunk of geometric white angles and a soaring four-storey atrium that's become one of my favourite places. Coffee in the cafe at the Arts Centre. The card entry gates of the library. The short walk down the curving road, assorted buildings of the university becoming denser like scattered foothills. The humid humanity of the Sports block. The gangrenous 1960s wasteland of Humanities. The soaring new engineering buildings. Somehow, it's become home.

I continue drifting in the damp gloom. Back to where it all started: the collection of white cubes on Scarman Road.

Silently I walk down the now-hushed corridors of the business school. The coffee nook. The printer corner. The syndicate rooms. The student lounge. Remembering all the moments of the last six months: the frustrations, the late nights, the syrupy fog of breaktime doughnuts and the clacking vooosh of the coffeemaker. The conversations, the headaches, the scribbles on whiteboards. And the laughter. Amid the toil, there was a lot of laughter.

All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

Time to say goodbye.

Post mortem: Modelling & Analysis

Executive Summary: Starting from a poor quality dataset with high STEM, the SD of a 50% probability reduced with a positive effect on the Confidence Interval!

MAM is one of the really hard MBA courses - building and interpreting Excel tools that optimise or maximise KPIs for business - and everyone's been dreading this one. Oddly, I found it strangely do-able.

In my business 'modelling' means making a prop for a photoshoot, so I was expecting performance to be, er, somewhat sub-Distinction level. It's an 'open book' exam (you're allowed to bring in notes) so last night I formulated a survival strategy: take in some model answers, whip through the 15 essay-type questions doing all the ones similar to my models, and leave the ones I just don't get (*cough* regression and sensitivity *cough*) to the end. Ultimately, although I know I didn't max out more than two or three questions markwise, I felt good enough about enough of them to feel pretty sure I've passed this one.

But as an aside: do WBS lecturers have informal competitions as to who can put the weirdest businesses in question format? The businesses that've appeared on exam papers this week include a chicken-breeding magazine, a maker of bicycles built for four people, a company making tapestries of witches to hang in your kitchen (it had a capacity of 15,000 a year, but who on EARTH would buy such a thing?) and a china tableware company that suddenly decided to go into industrial air filters. Are these guys laughing at us or what?

Post mortem: Marketing Strategy

Executive Summary: FINALLY an easy one. Let's face it, if I found an exam with 'marketing' in the title difficult I'd need to seriously re-evaluate my life.

Two essays from a choice of eight, both with elastic subject matter I can fit a number of possible diagrams to to show I DID listen in class. There's something for everyone here. One of my essays, though, ends up being based on my personal experience of segmenting history (geographics, demographics, then psychographics) rather than an amalgam of slides presented; I'm unlikely to get a high mark for it but at least the examiner will find it interesting. This is the first exam I know I've passed, and in such exams it's good to have a little fun.

However, one thing's really annoying me: the way people TALK in the exam hall, before, after, and even during the exam. They just won't shut up. Mouths are twitching long before all papers have been collected; basically at the first possible moment they think they can get away with it. Why do so many people lack the self-discipline to stay shut up for just TWO FUCKING MINUTES longer?!!!

Post mortem: Management Accounting

Executive Summary: AARGH! Have I crapped out on TWO of the bastard exams? Management Accounting was a nightmare! Maybe I'm just not cut out for this MBA stuff.

What's worse is the course wasn't all that bad: lots of numbers, obviously, but unlike Corporate Finance the concepts of budget-flexing and activity-based costing are mainly commonsensical. Yesterday afternoon I concentrated on variances, since it's the area I was weakest on, and was determined to choose a 'variances' question in Section B today. Of course, there was NO BLOODY VARIANCES QUESTION.

Let's just say I now know why the Ops Strategy elective has so many people in it: it's non-examined...

Anyway, the exam starts badly. The Hall's warmer than yesterday, in the same way the surface of the sun is warmer than an ice cube, but the atmosphere's a bit locker-room since there's only one GIRL around (admittedly the one is a hottie, but I don't function well in 30:1 male dominated situations.) And the paper is REALLY REALLY DIFFICULT.

WBS to MBAs: Ha ha, thought you were starting to enjoy yourselves, did you?

Five choices per question, and every choice A-E is plausible; there's no knocking aside of obviously wrong choices to increase your chances of guessing correctly. Every question, EVERY question, needs either a detailed act of memory or copious calculation to get right. I doubt I even got 50% here. The essay-type question is easier (maybe, just maybe, I picked up a few points) but there was still very little opportunity to bullshit.

And what you really need in an exam is bullshittability.

What's odd is that Management Accounting is a bullshittable subject. It's a lens created by accountants to present a company's operations in a certain light: it's as much a strategic and political tool as a reporting mechanism. That's its whole reason for being. Set people certain targets, contextualise their department in a certain way, demonstrate the method by which advantage is gained, and you've got people gaming the system. If you can get them to game it the way you want, you're onto a winner. You might even make money.

But when the game gets turned back on the gamer - i.e. in an exam - the bullshittability vanishes. Where Corporate Finance yesterday felt borderline but possibly passable, I'm pretty sure quite a few people (including me) will be getting resit invitations (or worse) in the next month or two. Not good.

Exam hell: cold turkey

It's hell not being able to have a glass of wine until THURSDAY. Especially after discovering I am the one person in the 80-strong cohort doing FIVE exams this week. Combination of doing an extra elective this term, plus all my chosens being assessed by exam rather than assignment. I'm the Man.

Hey, if it isn't hurting, it isn't working. Management Accounting tomorrow; time to snuff those variances.

Post mortem: Corporate Finance

Executive Summary: Either I failed the exam, or the airline in Section B got a real bargain on leasing its planes!

That's the central problem with Corporate Finance: you can't really tell if the numbers emerging from the equations 'feel right'. A discount factor of .8972 or .7118 - both are on the table, both are plausible, but put the first in Year 0 instead of Year 1 and you're screwed by multiple tenths of a percent in the final cost-of-capital figure. Of such mistakes are global economic meltdowns made.

There are other bad luck questions: the very first multiple-choice is on mortgage payback periods, the simplest equation in all of Corporate Finance, and it's NOT ON THE FORMULA SHEET. Bad start, bad start. But even worse, the temperature of the Sports Hall was a fraction of a degree above Absolute Zero. (When people from Siberia say it's cold, it MUST be true.)

But the basic issue remains: the intractibility of applying Corporate Finance to the real world. I'm a real-world person with an interest in the inchoate; does that explain why the subject interests me, but also why I'm so monumentally crap at it?

The problem with Corporate Finance is that it's a shared delusion: only real as long as enough people are willing to suspend their disbelief. It's why the whole subprime mortgage mess - which now threatens to tip the entire world economy into a slump - is happening. Because a rich white guy on Wall Street thought an unemployed guy in a rotting crackhouse on the bum side of Alabama could, properly spun, be an insanely great financial asset. He didn't think once of how his spreadsheets and sliced-and-diced CDOs applied to the real world.

The CFO of Goldman Sachs - presumably the smartest financial guy at the smartest financial group in the world - explained away such vast errors of judgement as '25-standard-deviation events, happening several days in a row.' Look buddy, 25 S.D. events just DON'T HAPPEN. Britain's recent earthquake - the first in decades - was perhaps a 2 S.D. event, and on the asymptotic scale of the Normal Distribution, 25 S.D's would've happened about once since Ug the Caveman was the man of the moment. For such events to have happened on several consecutive days - well, it'd be less surprising if a herd of Aptosaurii materialised in Hyde Park and started dancing the timewarp.

What happened, but which CFO Vinar didn't understand, was that his complex financial models were simply wrong. Not even in approximation, but in fundamental assumptions. Just - wrong. Yet to him - and to a thousand other City and Street movers and shakers - they represented reality better than reality itself.

[AAAARGH! I've just realised I forgot to add back the initial cost of the planes in both instances, which would have made A2 and B4 planes much closer competitors!!!] (But this illustrates my point: I'm applying my models to the real world. At least when I'm wrong I KNOW I'm wrong.)

I don't know if I've passed or failed Corporate Finance, but if I fail, it's because of those bloody aircraft. Well, I suppose that's appropriate given that 'winging it' is the only life philosophy I've ever had any success with.

The skydiving take on Corporate Finance

An image from the skydiving course has stayed with me: de-gloving your hand. It's what (can) happen if, for example, you don't remove your watch before jumping and a stray cable whips off the watch at 120mph, taking all the skin on your hand with it.

(Yes, at first I thought it just meant pulling off your gloves, too.)

I wonder if there are equivalent expresions for other parts of your body? De-socking your foot? De-epauletting your shoulder? Or even de-balaclava'ing your head?

The last would be exceptionally nasty, but let's face it, it'd be a grand exit - landing with a bloody grinning skull where your face used to be. Since you're going to die anyway, the best thing to do would probably be to get someone to pour petrol over you and set fire to your head. "Newsflash! A skydiver from Warwick's been revealed as the Ghost Rider!"*

So what's this got to do with Corporate Finance? As possibly the hardest of Warwick's elective courses, Corporate Finance revision has been having a similar effect on my brain as that stray cable on a watch-wearing wrist. I feel that learning one more equation or methodology is going to 'de-Finance my brain', and all the stuff I've already learnt will be blown away.

Revising this subject (and two others, to be fair: there are only two exams I feel confident of passing next week) has become less about getting a good score and more about survival. Four techniques - NPV, WACC, bond pricing, and CAPM - are bound to feature in more than 50% of questions, so I'm concentrating on learning these four methods and sod everything else.

The reason for this is that revision as-you-go-along hasn't been possible this term; too much time taken up in groupwork and projects. I've had to fit basically all my study into the last seven days, and it just hasn't worked. I'm hardly the only person having problems, but all the same I can't wait for the next few days to be over.

*This does NOT imply I enjoyed the Nicholas Cage film of the Ghost Rider character, which ranks among the worst films ever made.

Yesterday's news

The switchover's happened. Halfway through the MBA, with team projects and groupwork over, and the Modular MBA crowd have taken over 'our' part of the WBS building. Syndicate rooms, coffee space, even printers are surrounded by an invisibile force field that clearly states: You Fulltimers Are No Longer Welcome Here. Stories abound of being physically pushed aside at photocopiers.

It is perfectly obvious what has happened here.

With the most structured teaching finished, the 2007 intake is now yesterday's story. We have been abandoned to our fate, shunted into the gaping maw of weekly crammers and Project & Dissertation terms: no longer an 80-strong group of the 'special ones', but now merely faces in the vasty crowd of ALL Warwick's MBAs, modular to executive to distance learning, a cast of thousands. We have been tossed aside like an outdated case study. On the fulltime programme, the focus will now be on the 2008 intake, marketing the Warwick MBA to a fresh crowd of hopefuls and getting those GMATs and signatures done in another round of the endless business of adult education. And it hurts.

Of course, we all knew this would happen. But when you've been working in each others' pockets for months, you get territorial about the little spaces you inhabit; some of us have spent multiple all-nighters in those little Syndicate rooms, and now the syndicates are no more, the rooms have been re-allocated. To Executive people. To Distance Learning people. To Modular people.

(What is a 'modular person' anyway? Can you take them apart, unscrewing their heads and limbs, and click them back together in different configurations? Are they posable?)

I only just got here, but there's a feeling now that my year out is already starting to end.

I am not very good at Corporate Finance

I thought I'd enjoy Corporate Finance, and I do, but over the last eight weeks I've realised I'm just no good at it. Equations, breaking problems into parts, looking at the big picture, and taking views on things: these are all the things I'm good at. ("One of the world's top copywriters", remember?) But somehow I just haven't gripped this subject. I don't feel the relationship between Rd and Re in my bones; don't have an instinct for what beta does, can't remember the Capital Asset Pricing Model offhand. This'll all change in the next two weeks - it HAS to with an exam coming up - but right now, everything's nowhere near as solid as it should be.

Which means the presentation today is going to go REALLY well. A class audience including two lecturers (the aforementioned Teutonic and Italianate ones) after a week of 4am mornings. An audience who, like me, have spent a lot of hours recently trying to understand the case study and are itching to ask questions on where we went wrong.

The principle of such things is: DON'T just 'take them through the information' - take the information THROUGH THEM!!!

I run through the numbers, about HALF of which my addled brain gets fully. Assumptions, views-taken, and arbitrary rationalisations are the order of the day. Then the questions start. Here's how I'd LIKE the question session to go:

"Why is the risk-free rate 8.95%?"

"LOOK - it just fucking IS, alright?! So sue me!"

"Why did you choose Quinta as the base for working out divisional WACC?"

"That's a very, very good question. Let me answer it with a question of my own."

And so on. We handle the actual questions as a team, and it all goes fine, but I'm concerned at just how few of the calculations I have committed to memory despite spending seven hours on this (and that's just me; probably 30 hours all-in from the team.)

But as this second MBA term draws towards its close, that's another hurdle leaped. Even if I'll never be able to use the word 'hurdle' again without linking it with 'rate'.

Power to the People

When they cut the power, the People must make Power of their Own.

Beard-stroking liberals aren't a common sight on commercially-focussed Warwick University - and least of all at the ultra-capitalist Business School - but when the electrons stopped flowing today, things got uglier than a hairy leftie on a bad hair day.

Yes, there were power cuts across campus. Possibly connected to the 'quake last night, where 5000 students woke up and... fondly thought they had company. In the dusty aftermath, this top-tier university acquired a third-world electricity network for the afternoon.

In the MBA section, the lesser syndicate groups were walking out in disgust, stripped of their power by... lack of power. Hardier syndicates gamely stayed on, forgetting the PCs and PowerPoints and resorting to... actual conversation, can you believe it.

There were demonstrations of undergrads in the darkened corridors, chanting "WHAT DO WE WANT? NET PRESENT VALUE! WHEN DO WE WANT IT? NOW!" in Chinese accents. OK, only joking, but the point is made.

The coffee machines were off. The security-carded doors were open to all. (Yes, ALL. Undergrads in the postgrad wing. Science people taking shortcuts back to Lakeside. Even... shock horror... LIBERAL ARTS TYPES?!!) Civilisation, truly, neared its end today. It was a strange kind of chaos: quiet, accepting, yet utterly apocalyptic, like the 2000 neocon takeover of the US government that set the USA's respect in the world back 75 years.

And when at last the power came back on, we felt... cleansed. But at the same time, slightly disappointed. Our NPV and ROI focussed lives had been given a taste of what it's like to live... off the grid.

And some of us, perhaps, liked it a little.

The bear pit

In the last five minutes of the Corporate Finance lecture, the room erupts into absolute chaos!

The scheduling for an assignment handed out is tight, and this late in the term everyone's fighting to keep up with the work, so nerves are on edge. But time isn't the fundamental problem: scheduling is. Everyone here is a member of at least 4 syndicate groups, each a different set of people (I'm in 5) and there is NO commonality of calendaring.

What this means is that everyone in the room has to agree a meeting time. And they have to do it RIGHT NOW, no question, because if the decision slips into email or the weekend it'll be impossible to get answers. A frenzy of shouts and gesticulations rises to fever pitch in seconds, not helped by the fact that not many people know who's in their designated group.

Shouted back row: "Yo! Can we talk a second?"

"Need to negotiate! Let's do this deal now."

"How's everyone fixed for Monday evening?"

"Monday?"

"How about Monday afternoon?"

"I've got POM!"

"There might be a session Wednesday morning!"

"Wednesday afternoon! I bid Wednesday afternoon!"

"Thursday evening reports poor third-quarter results!"

"Pork Bellies! Pork Bellies at 81 4/32!"

OK, I made the last two up, but you see my point. It's like being in the bear pit of the New York stock exchange! For a full four minutes the 'trading floor' is a nerve-jangling web of palpable tension and frustration, alliances and trading positions being formed and re-formed second by second, as factions and raiders mount their assaults on each other's calendars. Shouting down the weak and filling their boots with the strong.

My opening bid to acquire Monday evening gets rejected by a determined duo of asset-strippers in Row 2, but my exploratory Put option on midweek yields a head-and-shoulders shape on the graph. I short-sell Wednesday afternoon in the hope of talking up the less liquid Wednesday morning, and suddenly everyone's buying Wednesday before lunch (which everyone will miss, of course, lunch being for wimps). I cut my losses on Monday - if you can't take your losses, you shouldn't be in the market - and fill my boots with Wednesday morning. It's agreed. The culture of the Bear Pit has produced another result. Wow, that was INTENSE!

Where are my red braces?

Everyone is giving the Corporate Finance lecturer a hard time today

A room full of inquisitive and intelligent people will always have questions when being taught new concepts, and the MBA crowd is a pretty gregarious bunch. We've switched Corporate Finance lecturers for the second half of the course, and she's never more than thirty seconds into an explanation before half a dozen people butt in with questions.

This is, of course, THE MOST ANNOYING THING IN THE WORLD.

Did Isaac Newton drop his quill formulating s=ut+(0.5*at^2), and switch to calculating the effects of sunlight and wind resistance on the bloody falling apple, before he'd pinned down the underlying simplicity of the concept? NO. The whole point here is to understand the THEORY first, clean and untouched, so you can recognise it through all the dirt of the real world that obscures it later. But nobody is getting this.

Can we - just TRY - absorbing the fucking THEORY first before complicating it with irrelevant fudge factors? Why is everybody trying to include the whole world in the model before gripping the basics? Are they really that much smarter than me? GET WITH THE PROGRAMME, PEOPLE.

Admittedly, some of it may be due to the previous lecturer's Teutonic roots and the current one's Italian heritage: there's rather a difference in teaching styles. Accuracy and precision are an ingrained part of the German national character; among Italians they're - er - perhaps not seen as quite so fundamental. Attention to detail on the lecture slides is more 1970s Lancia than BMW X5 (4 of 7 slides contain numerical errors.) But that's not what's causing the problem. The problem is Us.

And to pick one isolated example - let's just say that when two Italians are talking from different perspectives, "Can I just finish my sentence" is something of a futile request.

What's odd is that the concept being taught is, at heart, REALLY SIMPLE. It's nowhere near as complicated as IRR or bond valuation; it's more intuitive and real-world. This should be one of the easier lectures, yet it takes forever to get past each slide.

My colleagues are going through an exercise in MISSING THE FUCKING POINT here, and it's exasperating. Or maybe - since I'm the one annoyed by it - the one who's missing the point here is ME. Just wish I knew what that 'point' was.

Management Accounting is a lot like... making love to a beautiful woman

Guest lecturer today, and he's rather good. Articulate, affable, intelligent and personable with relevant experience in the financial field up the wazoo.

Unfortunately, he also looks exactly like a a famous character from a 1990s British comedy show and the Brits in the room spend the hours in the shaking silence of barely suppressed merriment.

Now, when you sit in the front row most of the time this does NOT come as a welcome touch of humour in the tortured second term of an MBA; it's terrifying. Every minute, every second, I'm on the verge of corpsing into fits of helpless laughter.

With an iron will I steady myself. (NO! NOT an iron will! That sounds like something Swiss Tony'd have! "Stopping yourself from laughing is a lot like making love to a beautiful woman... you need an iron willSTOP!!!) The next case study numbers come up on the big board.

I am hoping - fervently - that the business won't be a used car dealership. If that happens I won't be able to stop myself.

Luckily it's a hotel chain. ("Running a hotel is a lot like...STOP!") I DARE not glance around at the other Brits; I'm certain EVERYONE is seeing the joke here, but they're protected by a row or two of people. Why oh why do I always have to sit at the front?!!

He's got all the traits Swiss Tony would have if he were a real life person: i.e slightly more authentic and less exaggerated. He's possibly the actual person Swiss Tony was based on: a certain suaveness and assumed gravitas that are easily parodied, just on the right side of caricature and ripe for pushing over the edge into comedy. Which of course makes it all the more comical. Help me, I can't stand it!

After about 1000 years or so it's time for the coffee break, and five adult males collapse in hysterics. Only 90 minutes to go. We can make it, I think.

Management Accounting. You've got to keep your figures in shape, plan your activities for maximum payback, and drive down deeply and repeatedly into the relevant areas. In fact, it's a lot like making love to a beautiful woman.

I am The Resolver

I resolve things.

It's just what I do.

Communication problems in an MBA module. A valuable guy the class somehow isn't gelling around, lots of surface friction preventing value being unlocked. I get people talking, then try to get past the personalities and search for the problems. Feeling around blindly on the dark ocean floor of base human behaviour swilled through the imperfect sieve of language, I slowly bubble-sort the issues. Then start to unpick them.

And sometimes when you unpick issues, they can be quite simple. A bit of talking, a day of polling, and what needs to be done is clear. So I do it. Invest a few hours, out-of-hours, diplomatically politicking between parties, gradually seeing the problems for what they really are: just typographical errors on the page of life.

And it works. The comments and emails post-resolution are still coming in.

I am The Resolver. I resolve things. It's just what I do.

I can resolve anything.

Anything except the endless conflicts within myself.

I cannot understand where this pain in my shoulders came from

My shoulders are killing me today. I couldn't even hit the pool. A deep muscular ache deep in the deltoids, as if I've been lifting weights (and this week I've only made it into the water twice.)

I've a feeling today is my monthly 'crash day'. I get these about once a month, whether I want them or not: a feeling, usually after a burst of bad humour, that I've been overdoing it and need to relax for a day. My planned day of Corporate Finance fell completely by the wayside; instead I've read, snoozed, enjoyed a Guinness down Varsity, all the stuff a second-term MBA shouldn't really be doing. I'm at a total loss for what to do this evening. But it feels good.

A new dawn

OK, after a great Friday I've bounced back a bit; it's amazing what the buzz of the City around me, a real release of pent-up tension, and a few glasses of wine in intelligent company can do. Getting there and back in a day really blows the budget for a student, but I just need to do this stuff once a month or I really would go under. Life is about having opportunities, and every time my train pulls into Euston I get that tingling sensation of Possibility Everywhere.

The day made a difference. I was glowing so much that back at Coventry Station a guy asked to share a taxi back to the University, thinking I was "a second year". Which would make me about 21. (At which point I almost offered to have his children.)

But this weekend I've GOT to knuckle down to those Corporate Finance questions, with only a burger at Varsity likely to break the monotony. Life is hard. As it should be.

Warwick climbs the rankings... again

According to the new FT MBA survey, Warwick's MBA programme is now in the world's top 30. Edging past longtime rival Cranfield and leaving famous names like Carnegie Mellon, Imperial College, and Thunderbird in the dust. A great result, especially considering Warwick's egalitarian admissions policy, which looks for 'interesting' people (often older and with esoteric backgrounds) rather than thrusting one-dimensional young banker types (Hi, Oxford Said!)

Warwick treats the FT list as key, although I prefer the Economist's, which uses slightly more esoteric criteria but 'feels right' somehow. Nobody outside North America bothers with the Business Week rankings; whatever anyone says, they're COMPLETELY American biased, with even the 'international schools' list concentrating on... Canada.

But the FT ranking is great news, and you know what? It's only going to get better.

Today I'm submitting an assignment for the strangest of the compulsory modules, Practice of Management: a new course in 'soft skills' designed to answer the complaint that MBA graduates are too quantitative and not people-focussed enough. Like all newly-introduced courses, POM is rather obviously not bedded-in yet, and grumbling among the cohort is continuous.

The lectures - delivered by outside consultants including the great Nicholas Bate - are often individually very good; the problems here are with coherence. There's no strong sense of each session being part of a larger whole. There's a bigger issue with the project part; if you've got some years of business experience already, the briefs are insultingly simplistic yet labour-intensive, reducing the value-add: it's just busywork. The 'real world experience' is all very well, but most of us came here to escape the real world for a while and learn something with academic rigour without the goo and dribble of the real world intruding. But all this misses the point.

The point is that POM is a work in progress. Every year it'll get tweaked and tuned, and in a decade it could be a world-beater, capable of putting Warwick into the top 10 all on its own. I hope WBS takes every opportunity to make that happen.

The volume of homework given in Corporate Finance class is really quite amazing

Make no mistake, Corporate Finance is a difficult module for a non-quant. Of course this is why City types get paid so well - finance is that killer combination of both difficult and boring. It's serious 'hard work'.

And it remains hard work even when you're getting it right. I got most of last week's set correct, making me feel like a Master of the Universe in class today - but getting to grips with the concepts strongly enough to answer the questions took SEVEN HOURS on Wednesday, and that's in addition to the textbook readings, re-readings, and revision plus of course the lectures themselves. I estimate Corporate Finance takes about three times as much time per week as any other module.

Or four times if you concentrate on this week. The next problem set is TWELVE questions long, some with up to eight parts involving multiple subcalculations. Now assuming the NPV of the course is on the SML as applied to MBA modules, the yield of the module over the 10-week time-to-maturity is only slightly more than 33% of the expected return if calculated in accordance with second-order Taylor and discounted at a constant rate...!

Tonight's star billing, "Management Accounting", is brought to you by...

... a medley of Pink Floyd, Psychedelic Furs, and Procol Harum. I sort of like things that exploded into smithereens years before (even) I was born, and anyway, I need something reasonably mellow when I'm catching up on textbooks. Chapters 9-12 are on the cards and I'm hoping to get through before midnight.

What the hell is with the Warwick MBA, anyway? Relaxation is a luxury, sleep a decadence. This term contains fewer courses (for most people) and fewer projects (for most people) so should be a breeze compared to Term 1. But I, of course, am not Most People, so I'm awake until all hours cramming my skull with equations and context.

Back to the books...

Creativity vs. hard work

The Japanese turns his head quizzically and states, "Ah, these creative things, I find so hard. I wish I could learn to do such things."

What the FUCK?

I'm trying to revise something titled 'Specification Variable Estimation in Regression Analysis', spanning two textbooks, two modules, and about four cups of coffee. I've got a reasonable head for figures but this stuff is unaccountably HARD.

The Japanese, however - who finds this stuff 'easy' - is pointing towards a crop of campaigns in the corner that took less than two hours to conceive, write, and design. It's one of the simplest advertising c