Archive for January, 2006
There is a MIT Young Alumni Seminar being held next Thursday, February 9.
Join us for this extremely timely, relevant and engaging discussion, offered exclusively to the young MIT alumni community of Austin. The panel of distinguished MIT alumni including: Michael Davis Jr. ‘86, Founder & President, Davis Law Group; Abha Divine EE ‘91, President and CEO, SBC, Knowledge Ventures; Brian Hughes ‘77, Chairman, HBN Shoe LLC – moderator; and Norman Schumaker CM ‘68, President and CEO, Molecular Imprints Inc., present their unique perspectives on their career trials, tribulations and transitions.
This is a fantastic opportunity, and I plan on going — just paid my $20 in fact. Looking forward to meeting the successful alumni of MIT! Plus, it’s a seminar that’s focused on career change, and being a current MBA student at McCombs, I can definitely offer some help in that department.
January 31st, 2006
Classes have been in session for two weeks now, and already I’m feeling it.
- Marketing Management – lots and lots of reading. We formed groups to give presentations, and our group drew the very first one. The topic was on market research, in particular shortcomings of existing methods and an introduction into emerging practices. We presented this past Tuesday on one week’s notice. That hurt.
- Managerial Economics – my buddy Rob told me on title alone, this class sounds like it blows. But it’s definitely not boring. Our professor is quite a trip – almost a Robin Williams-type character. A few classmates agree his lectures are more like talks – entertaining, topical, and yet so disjointed from the reading material we’re supposed to be reviewing before each class.
Two things I learned this week:
- Malcolm Gladwell wrote Blink in Austin! Apparently he holed up at the San Jose Hotel for few weeks, unplugged from the world, and cranked it out. (I love that place.)
- Baby boomers are going to destory us all. Spending all their savings and expecting Social Security to save them. Thanks a lot, you jerks.
January 27th, 2006
This WSJ article (link below, reg req’d) is the first time I’ve heard of radio “multicasting,” but I think it’s brilliant. You have an industry with old technology (what’s on the radio?) and limited capacity (there are only so many stations on the dial). Before you knew it, competition (Sirius/XM) one-upped you on both. Yet they do it at a price: $120-150 a year. Your draw is a free service, so as long as you compete on technology and capacity, listeners will stay tuned.I would buy a digital radio in-dash player over satellite in a heartbeat. After the outlay of cash, the service is free! Even at $379, which Crutchfield lists for a Kenwood model, I could break even in 2 years.Plus NPR is going to multicast, which can only be a good thing. (Business and tech channels please!) Can’t say I’m as excited for Clear Channel’s offering though. Only way I’d listen to their crap is if they offered a 24-hour traffic channel, and even then you’d expect 21 minutes of ads every hour.Read more at
online.wsj.com/article/… January 19th, 2006
Apple’s greatest move: Retail Stores – 37signals
Interesting article, and while it explains how Apple executed that strategy so well, it doesn’t really explain WHY Apple decided to go retail in the first place. When you have a product line that sells well through established sales channels, why would you take on the added costs of building and running these stores? I would submit that much of the reasoning was to increase efficiency in the supply chain.
Enter the Bullwhip Effect. To make a long story short, let’s say you have a supply chain 4 players deep — manufacturers to wholesalers to distributors to retailers. Now assume the retailer sells a product the manufacturer builds, and demand at their end is constant. You’d expect the order demand at each level — retailers buying from distributors, distributors buying from wholesalers, wholesalers buying from the manufacturer — to also be constant.
Not so.
Because of various factors that I won’t go into, the order demand actually becomes more varied the closer you get to the manufacturer. (Really, it does.) That variance can wreck havoc with each stop, and hits the manufacturer the worst. The company that sees consistent demand for their products at retail have to deal with wild fluctuations in demand from the wholesaler — one month it’s 10,000 orders, the next month it’s only 800. Operationally, that’s a nightmare. You can’t just cut staff for a month when your cycle is low, and the bank wants to get paid whether or not your machines are running.
So clearly, one of the factors that plays into the bullwhip effect is that there’s no visibility of retail demand from the manufacturer’s perspective. They’re basically flying blind. In Apple’s case, the data they were getting from stores like CompUSA and MacMall wasn’t real-time; a sales summary report after-the-fact is too little, too late.
That is what makes the Retail Store so valuable to Apple. When a sale is made at the store, Apple’s manufacturing arm sees it immediately. Apple not only sees the demand at the stores, but they can also extrapolate it across all their partner retailers. And while Apple doesn’t exactly build the products, they can dictate the terms to the contracted builders in China: build this stuff with this data as the target.
That definitely explains why lots of manufacturing companies have tried to get into retail. It’s a great idea, but one you have to execute upon. And Apple hit it out of the ballpark.
January 17th, 2006
This got passed around the office last week.
Go USC!
(Apparently there’s a Snopes link for this pic. And while someone else claims it’s from the game-winning drive, that’s definitely not true. I’m fairly sure the actual photo is legit.)
January 16th, 2006
Say hello to the Texas Longhorns, 2006 College Football National Champions. We rule! [1]
I just replied to a message in my inbox dated a few weeks ago, when someone predicted a USC blowout. Sure was fun to type that up this morning.
It was amazing to hear all the pregame pub about the USC juggernaut that was supposed to blow out Texas. I think the only rational people that saw the possibility of a close game all lived in Austin. People here at least respect the Trojans. To me, this was Miami/OSU all over again. [UPDATE: Stewart Mandel absolutely nailed it]
So back to Vince. It’s a shame the media didn’t watch more Texas games. He’s been doing that since the 12-0 loss to OU last year. It’s been incredible to watch this guy week after week, performing at the level he plays at. Hell, these guys could’ve learned a lot from my wife.
As for the draft possibility, my bet is that he stays for one more year. Dude is good friends with guys like Roy Williams and “Walk the Earth” Ricky, both of whom know that the business side of the NFL isn’t fun. They force you to live in a crappy city you don’t know AND submit to drug testing. You do that eventually either way, but only one option lets you party in Austin for an entire year. Vince owns this city in a way Ricky never did, and that’s bigger than big. He’ll enjoy every minute of the king’s life.
Hook ‘Em!
[1] – I normally am against the use of “we” when describing team sports, unless you suit up or coach for said team. But I think college football is an exception. If you’ve paid tuition, you’ve earned the right to use it. And as a current grad student at UT, I can proudly proclaim this.
January 5th, 2006
It’s official: I am bored.
I have now been on winter break from business school for one month. (Still going to work full time, but no classes on the part-time schedule.) The folks at the McCombs evening program were actually quite kind to students: they scheduled 5 1/2 weeks of no classes over December and January.
At first, I really enjoyed the relative slowness of what used to be my normal schedule. Sleeping in Saturdays, going home at 6 pm on weekdays, not packing 2 meals before leaving the house on class days. A 40-hour work week, and the rest of the time was mine. It was really nice.
For about a week.
Now? I can’t wait for classes to begin. I have been desperately trying to stay busy in the past 3 weeks. I built a web site out of curiosity. I agreed to build my parents a website for their business. I’ve been so desperate to work on something, I’ve even considered migrating this site from Blogger to Wordpress 2.0, just for the experience. (I can already picture myself screwing around on some new WP plugin instead of doing work or finishing my assignments.)
I thought I did a pretty good job making time for school this semester. I made some sacrifices and changed some habits. Less TV, fewer blogrolls, less email. I was satisfied with my grades, so I know the changes worked — in other words, I managed my uptime effectively. But now, with the extended break, I feel the same bad habits starting to creep back in. I’m watching a lot more TV and reading a slew of new linkblogs. In spite of my best effort to stay busy, I don’t feel like I’ve managed my downtime effectively. Instead, I feel a tiny bit of guilt that my time’s been wasted watching “24″ or reading digg.
If anything, this break has been a learning experience. There will be another weeks-long break, that’s pretty much guaranteed. I just need to be prepared for it, lining up projects and prioritizing things to do. That sure beats debating yourself on the merits of busywork for the sake of boredom.
January 4th, 2006
You know you’re clinging to the holidays when you start finding things to add egg nog to. Last night, I had some egg nog ice cream. This morning, I was out of milk, so I put a splash of egg nog in my coffee. Mmmm…tastes like Christmas!
January 2nd, 2006
