What’s interesting is that he stresses that with more choice, our expectations of the decisions we make are greater. However, we often don’t feel this way because we constantly mull over the other choices that we passed up (economists call this opportunity cost). He then goes on to point out that everything was better back when everything was worst. They weren’t as many choices and there was a clear choice between good, better, and best.

The business application of this lesson is determining the number of choices to offer consumers and how do we market/position them. Do we flood the market with products and advertising and then put the onus on the consumer to decide? Or do we clearly position our product and help guide the consumer to the right product for them? One path leads to consumers being paralyzed about what to choose while the other pushes the consumer. I know that these are two extreme examples but hopefully they are thought-provoking.

Anyways, it was a great talk and for those who want to know more about TED, check out their website. There are tons of great info here. I hope I’ll be asked to present to this prestigious organization one day.

I recently finished reading “The Goal” by Eliyahu Goldratt for an operations course that I’m take at Rice. It is a very interesting book as it highlights how a plant manager struggles to bring his plant back to profitablity before corporate shuts him down. I’m reminded of One of the main points of the book–that efficiency does not always equal productivity. The book defines efficiency as doing a job quicker with less waste and productivity as doing a job that brings you closer to your goal. Therefore, it is possible to be very efficient without being productive at all.

Although this book was written some decades ago, it still has application for life now in the 21st century. Blackberries, broadband connections, and wireless networks have become ubiquitous, but have we become any more productive as a result of them?

I think in the near future we are going to see a huge boom in literature that will educate people on how to focus in our fast-paced world. More importantly it will emphasize the delineation between efficiency and productivity. Hopefully we will learn how to leverage technology not only to be faster in completing jobs, but making sure that these jobs are actually getting us closer to a specific goal.

surya started off the task by talking about “brand equity”, the “synergies that could be leveraged”, etc. his team, few of which has mba, looked at him in amazement as if to say “what the hell are you talking about?”.

while this may be a slight hyperbole of real-life situations (i mean c’mon, this example is from the apprentice), i feel that it teaches a great lesson that many of us MBAs, or rather anyone with a very technical degree needs to remember: if you can’t communicate your knowledge (frameworks, theories, latest NYT bestseller buzzwords) into laymen terms, then you probably don’t understand what you’re talking about. i mean what importance is knowledge if you can’t communicate or share it.

this is especially important for MBAs (myself included) who set out to conquer the world with 5 Forces Model, SWOT analysis, 4Ps or 3Cs, and the congruence model. learning all of these great tools is futile if we can’t explain this knowlege to colleagues, subordinates, or customers.

just food for thought. it’ll make you think twice when you’re reading the next NYT best seller or WSJ article.

the sad part about this it is that this couldn’t be any farther from the truth. while i do believe there is some substantial difference of the quality of education received among certain clusters of universities, there is a point where this difference is negligible. once you reach this point, it becomes a contest of who can game ranking systems the best or who has the most famous alumni or who can spend the most money on marketing. for your sake i will end this digression but please believe that in america, secondary education is honestly starting to lose focus of it’s mission and become a very profitable industry. check out npr’s coverage.

don’t knock me as anti-harvard because i’m sure some perhaps are thinking “he’s just bitter because he didn’t get in”. this is way off base because i never applied to harvard. i don’t see myself as the “harvard” type. but understand that i am pro-rice. i am pro-underdog. i’m pro-”anything and anyone who doesn’t get respect because they’re not the media’s darling or number one”.

today rice mba finally got more respect by making the final cut of national university of singapore’s global business case competition. check it our here.

here are some select comments from the article:

here are a few of the readers’ comments about the issue:

here is my comment:
“I agree with some of the comments mentioned, however, I do believe that the decision to let undergrads straight into MBA programs should be done on a case-by-case basis (at least that’s how it’s done here). While I disagree with heavily publicizing MBA programs as open to all undergrads, I do believed that exceptions can be made for candidates that are “ready”. By “ready”, I mean candidates who have a clear purpose for getting an MBA, who bring some unique experience to the table and who will not drown with the workload. I came out of an top 10 undergraduate university with a degree in computer engineering. I’m currently enrolled in a top business school after coming straight out of undergrad. With dreams of working on the business side of a tech company, I strongly considered an MBA coming out of undergrad since spending 2-3 years as a traditional engineer would not have added any additional value to my business acumen. Despite my youth, I am a strong performer and contributor in my classes.

I understand the comments and issues that have been addressed but let’s be careful to not blanket all undergrads as immature candidates that inhibit the learning atmosphere or undermine the essence of an MBA. Also, I would like to make the counterargument that just because you’re an experienced candidate doesn’t make your MBA experience any more valuable than another’s. In my first year of the program, I’ve encountered several older candidates who to them an MBA is just initials that will go after their name to gain a higher salary.

If anything, people who truly do not value the learning process behind the MBA, young or old, are truly individual who undermine the essence of the MBA.”

the essay starts off by asking “why are fire trucks always clean?” one would imagine with all of the firefighting they do that they can’t possibly keep the truck clean. and even so, it’s not like a clean firetruck puts out fires any better than a dirty one. well, while firefighters are waiting to respond to an emergency, they keep ready by cleaning the truck.

well seth parallels this cleaning of trucks to organizations that are keeping busy by putting out existing fires rather than trying to prevent ones. they are stuck with a backwards- rather than forward-looking mindset; they are busy fighting yesterday’s problems with out trying to figure out how to prevent tomorrow’s. it essentially singles out those who try to avoid criticism for not improving with the excuse of “at least i’m busy”.

what’s so scary about this? it’s so easy to become bogged down with all of your daily firefighting that you forget to think about the future. it’s so easy to become “stuck but busy”. the worse part about it is that it’s even harder for you to detect it because your subconcious is still equating “being busy” with “being productive” or “being remarkable”.

now in no way am i endorsing not a complete negligence of existing problem, but this article does make you reconsider whether you have been sacrificing new opportunities for the sake of fire containment.

just food for thought.

there are roughly 6.5 billion people on this earth. that’s 6.5 billion different versions of “reality”. one of us has to have correct version of reality, right? funny, we’re all right and all wrong at the same time.

totally random post but it was a random thought that came across my mind. this sounds like some metaphysical, transcendatilism post. don’t worry. i’m not on drugs right now. just burned out from school (and the internship search).

this rant is primarily motivated from my experience with dell. i bought a desktop freshman year with scholarship money. since then, i’ve upgraded to using Apple laptops but i still use my dell desktop as a linux machine. i recently looked at upping the memory and found that it’s more economical to buy a new computer than try to add 512 MB of RAM (price of 512 MB of RAM is around $250).

well, lesson learned. dell will never have my business again.

looking back, i always thought that if i somehow mastered a “process” that made me more efficient, i could do an infinite amount of things in 24 hours. well mathematically that doesn’t really make sense. your average joe on the street would tell you, “the limit of 24 / x tends to 0 as x approaches infinity”. i’ll break down the l33t speak for you bozos, the more crap you try to do in 24 hrs, the less time you have to do each task.

well for all that math that was forced done my throat as an engineering major, it seems that i didn’t really retain much. in my reality, i can take 24 hrs and do infinity tasks and still have time to watch 24 and prisonbreak every week. so with this in mind, i set out to find the magical “process” that would contradict all rules of mathematics.

so i’m given i’m a tech freak, i make the obvious first step: buy a pda. “ok cool. so now what?” well after playing with this for about a month, i saw this book as a best-seller on NYT: “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-free Productivity“. now i’ll spare you from a book review but in short, this book teaches really intuitive ways to help you become more productive (once again, my anal nature is revealed–”reading a book on how to do more work?”…um yeah) and it helped me defined that process that broke all rules of mathematics…well almost.

so with all this new found process that helps me do 1348710347813847 tasks in one day, i should be unstoppable right? i can go to b-school, help save the anime industry (i work as a market research analyst for adv), have a girlfriend, launch my startup, and still have time to play my playstation 3 that i’m too poor to buy.

the quick answer is NO. given all my new productivity powers, i’m not fighting procrastination. funny huh? i can do 13897341349807134 tasks in day, but only if i want to.

maybe i’ll go pick up this book on this too. =).

fyi to all, i’m the proud new owner of a macbook pro. i love this machine. seriously. here’s some pics of it on flickr.

freakdancing

i came across an article a couple of weeks ago that blew me away. houston chronicle headline: “stop the music, please–freak dancing over the top“.

now before i even started reading it, my cognitive biases began to tell me, “i bet this is just another article that seeks to attribute the downfall of american youth with a gratuitous number of references to MTV and mortal kombat.” but i thought that i would be as open-minded as possible before i began to read. however, by the time i reached the first sentence of third paragraph i knew the article was just crap.

“what is freak dancing? well it’s a respresentation of anal sex set to hip-hop music.”

wtf? now by all means i know that the way kids dance today isn’t exactly patty-cake but anal sex? c’mon. the author then goes on to beg the question, “could it just be a matter of time before freak dancing joins the middle-class mainstrem?”

my response: it’s already there. and if you think that the most tragic thing your kids are doing is freak dancing, think again.

between the time that i read the article and wrote this post, i had time to watch “better luck tomorrow”, a film produced by MTV profiling the lives of asian-american teens trapped in suburban lifestyle. overall, the movie was ok but really disturbing. what i found the most disturbing was when the protaganist said that in their world, you could do anything if you were smart enough to hide it…as long as they made good grades, no one questioned what they did?

to make a long story short, the kids in the movie ended up killing another rich kid, who was their nemesis, and then attempt to bury his body in their front yard.

now while this is a pretty extreme example of surburban kids up to no good, i really don’t think it’s a far stretch of what happens there. really intelligent kids with a ton of resources, free time, and no parental supervision. all of this leads me to ask the proponents of this anti-”hip-hop” campaign: would your kids be addicted to half of this stuff if you had more involvement in their lives?

meh. i know that this once as much of a quickie as i thought it would be but i had to get it out. here’s a cached version of the article for those who want to read its entirety.