Harvard Business School - Day 48 & 49

Saturday, 24 Oct 2009 and Sunday, 25 Oct 2009

We finished class at noon on Saturday, had a bite to eat at the canteen and then those of us that were heading away for our last weekend in Massachusetts met outside McArthur hall where there was a van and driver waiting. For the ten of us the destination for the day was Marth's Vineyard. The weather was pretty lousy as we headed south. It took about 1.5 hours to get to Woods Hole, which is where we took the ferry across to Matha's Vineyard as foot passengers. The trip across to Tisbury took about 45 minutes and we picked up another taxi van on the other side to take us the approximately 20 minutes to Oaks Bluff.

Our accommodation for the night was at a old mansion type house called the Oaks Bluff Inn. It was owned and run by an amiable and very laid back landlord called Eric. The house was resplendent in a slightly purple hue, which looked perhaps hinted at a flowers, caftans and chemical filled past, it describes itself as whimsically Victoria (http://www.oakbluffsinn.com/ ) , however inside is was very tidy and very homely and almost a little stately. The weather never abated on Saturday, but we had a few drinks, some dinner at a excellent restaurant called the Oyster Bar where they really did showcase the local seafood. Being anti establishment I had a steak which turned out to have been taken off the hind-quarters of Tyrannosaurus Rex. While it was cooked to perfect and as tender as you could want after eating about three pounds of it I gave up. I was going to doggy bag it and take it back to the Inn but I realised that I wouldn't be able to lift it so I left it for the next three hundred patrons to take turns at gnawing on.
Sunday dawned and presented us with a clear blue sky. Eric had prepared a very enjoyable breakfast and some typically shit American coffee, after which we went for a walk around Oak Bluff which is known for its large camping ground where the tents have over the last 150 years been replaced by little gingerbread cottages which are on land owned by the Martha's Vineyard Campmeeting Association. There are around 350 of these little cottages and they are all very close to each other and very cute.
We had arranged for our taxi driver of the previous day to pick us up at noon and give us a 3 hour tour of the island before depositing us back at the ferry for the 3:45pm sailing. The island itself is home to the "Islanders" many of who hail back from the island's whaling days, as well as seasonal holiday makers who number from amongst the most wealthy of U.S. east coast aristocracy. This is the island that JFK Jnr crashed his plane off in 1999 killing himself, his wife and sister, John Belushi (he of Blues Brothers fame) is burried here. Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama and their families come to or ave stayed on the island. Jaws was filmed there.
There seems to be a lack of consensus as to why Martha's Vineyard is in fact called Martha's Vineyard as there appeared to be no wineries what-so-ever (I am sure there must be one or two but they are certainly not prevalent) although the van driver advised us that vines did in fact grow wild. What I am authoritatively advised is that it is one of the few places in the United States today with a possessive apostrophe. Thus it is Matha's Vineyard, not Marthas Vineyard. We had lunch at a little fishing village. I had crab cakes and seafood chowder from a little take away shop, which was great. I bought some lobsters to which I had cooked so I could take them back to my living group. We made the 3:45pm ferry and a van was duly waiting for us back at Woods Hole, the Sunday traffic was kind to us and we were back in Harvard by about 6pm.
Our living group sans Ajay went out for dinner last night. Hopefully we can get all 8 of us together before the end of the week.

Harvard Business School Days 46 & 47

Thursday, 22 Oct 2009 and Friday, 23 Oct 2009
The last two days have passed by very quickly. Thursday night was notable because we ended up having impromptu party in our living group area. Neil was playing his guitar and he really is very good, knocking out a few classic 70s rock hits, with a particular passion for Eric Clapton. Along the way Wayne recited a Chinese opera number for us, which sounded nothing like Eric, but was polished non-the-less. The noise must have been heard in some adjacent living groups because in the space of about 30 minutes our 8 had turned into around 30 of us. There were a few tired looking people in class this morning.
Friday we had a lecture by Michael Porter (the guy in teh green tie with glasses) who is probably Harvard's most famous professor and apparently at one stage a few years ago was the world's second most expensive speaker behind Bill Clinton. Professor Porter gave a lecture on The Competitive Advantage of Nations, States and Regions. His big themes were understanding that the key metric was increasing productivity, which allowed higher wages and a higher standard of living to be obtained, on leveraging you natural endowments (e.g. resources like oil, or location like Singapore) and that it is hugely beneficial to create clusters. He spoke for about an hour and then took general questions for another half hour or so.
Steve my living group member (the guy without a tie, holding some leaves of paper wondering what Porter's name is) had the opportunity to introduce him, which he did well other than forgetting his name. I suspect we won't forget to remind him of that a few more times before we leave.

Friday night, following along on the previous weeks cultural evening theme, we had a kareoke night, which was a lot of fun and produced absolutely no tallent but a huge number of laughs. When the second person up is reasonably rotund a 6' 4' German banker and sings Almost Heaven in a way that only a mother could love (sorry Mike) it set the bar. But by God he set it low. It was a great night and I think the realisation that it will all be over in less than a week was one of the reasons that everyone just relaxed and had fun. The singing was on average awefull but the energy was massive. It was a fantatstic night.

Harvard Business School - Days 43 & 45

Monday, 19 Oct 2009 to Wednesday, 21 Oct 2009
The beginning of the week dawned and with it blue skies and sunshine once again, in stark contrast to the appalling weather of Sunday. Class continues to be engaging and interesting, but there is a real sense that the end is approaching rapidly. On Tuesday we had boxes delivered to our living groups for us to pack up, with international students boxes being dispatched on Monday next week. That was the first tangible sign that our self-centred existence of the last six and a half weeks is drawing to a close.
One of the things that I most enjoy about classes or through discussions with participants is being challenged to think about things in a different way, from a different perspective or indeed to consider issues with the benefit of new information . This YouTube video is an example Did You Know?
Tuesday nights (as I have said before) is rotation dinner night, so they mix up all the members in each living group and recombine them into groups of 8 or 9 that meet at a nominated living group and have dinner there. The concept is that it provides a mechanism to meet other participants and to share thoughts and ideas with a different group of people and in practice it works very well.
Neil and I ended up back in our living group area drinking port and watching Eddy Izzard and Monty Python videos on YouTube, quite possibly this wasn't the most constructive use of our time but it was most enjoyable.

Most nights we sit around as a living group and discuss the cases we have to prepare for class the next day. We try and achieve three things.

1. Develop a basic understanding of the case.
2. Work out what the key learnings or areas of specific interest are when applying the class curriculum to the case.
3. Share any personal insights or experiences that we have as individuals.

These sessions can go anywhere from about one hour to three hours. On top of this we have tried to allow time to discuss more broadly issues we have in our "other lives" and how we have thought through these issues while on the course and applied learnings as a way of understanding or addressing them. The photo is of Neil, myself and Philippe in one such living group discussion.

Harvard Business School - Day 42

Sunday, 18 Oct 2009
It was a bitterly cold day here on Sunday. The temperature was just above freezing (about 2 degree C) and there was drizzle and snow. You could only but feel sympathy for the rowers still plying their trade in the Charles River. We had an ANZAC dinner at a local seafood restaurant. There is actually 12 ANZAC's on the, if you count two expatriates (an American and a Scot) that are living in Australia. I guess with a combined Australasian population of around 25 million we must be the most represented group per head on the course.
The photo below is of my living group, in our living area after we had Professor Vietor around for drinks and nibbles last week.

Harvard Business School - Day 41

Saturday, 17 Oct 2009
Saturday passed by uneventfully, with classes finishing as normal at noon. Our working group has routinely used Saturday afternoon to prepare for class on Monday, therefore keeping Sunday free. However we varied it because the weather was so nice and the weather forecast on Sunday so bad.

We watched the rowers on the river.

I got some reading done as well as going over to Harvard Square for some lunch. Amnuay my Thai living group member took us out to a very traditional and very and very enjoyable Thai meal in Cambridge. We teamed up with Mark Young's (he of road trip fame) living group and had a great time. The


camaraderie and sense of togetherness that the participants in AMP 177 have developed over the time we have been here is incredible. After dinner a few of us then went into Boston and managed to find the original Cheers bar which kept us entertained for an hour or so and then caught a cab back to Harvard Square.

Harvard Business School - Day 40

Friday, 16 Oct 2009

There seemed to be a realisation amongst the participants on the course that time is running out and the daunting 8 week horizon we faced at the commencement of the program has been whittled down to the point where we be finished in two weeks today. A result of this is to put more substantial efforts into talking and understanding the culture, careers, lives and motivations of those on the course that one hasn't yet spend any meaningful time with. As if to underscore this intent today was filled with about as much cultural diversity as is plausible.
We started off with an Oktoberfest reception and dinner, which was replete with German beer, sauerkraut, bratwurst and other Bavarian fair. Following that Wayne (or living group's resident Chinese) had organised some of his colleagues to come over to our living group for an informal discussion of issues, observations and opportunities in China. After that we were invited by our Indian contingent (of which there must be about a dozen) to a Diwali Celebration. Diwali is a significant festival in Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism, and an official holiday in India. Adherents of these religions celebrate Diwali as the Festival of Lights. They light diyas, cotton string wicks inserted in small clay pots filled with oil (although this has largely been replaced by the use of candles) to signify victory of good over the evil within an individual. The had organised the local Hare Krishna Temple to come along and they provided some entertainment. All the Indian's were dressed up and resplendent in their traditional garb. We had our foreheads adorned with a red tilaka. There was a lot of lights, chanting and dancing. I have a card from the temple that says:
If you want to be happy, try chanting:

Hare Krishna Hare Krishna
Krishna, Krishna Hare Hare
Hare Rama Hare Rama
Rama Rama Hare Hare
This is a YouTube video that oone of teh participants shot  Diwali Night
I managed to get persuaded into purchasing a book called "The Science of Self-Realisation" which was a gift worthy of a donation if one felt so inclined. It was rather hard to take the book and be disinclined so I exchanged $20 for it. Its amazing how open to new ways of thinking you can be after several steins of German beer!!

As that died down, after culminating in some Indian Bingo [picture right]as a way of financing the night (and perhaps the Temple), the Japanese invited us out into the courtyard for some sushi and sake. A few of us escaped (smiling) from there and went into Harvard Square for a class of wine and a chat.

Outside our window both sides of the Charles River have become a collection of marques and people all there for the annual "Head Of the Charles Regatta" ( www.hocr.org ) which is by their own definition the worlds largest two day rowing regatta. The routinely expect 300,000 spectators along the banks and it is quite a spectacle.There are certainly a lot of people around and we have the perfect viewing spot from our living group window (as per the photo above).

Harvard Business School - Day 36 to 39

Monday, 12 Sep 2009 to Thursday, 15 Sep 2009
The days here are starting to speed by very quickly. There is still lots of work to do both during the day and in the evenings but somehow each day seems to disappear so much quicker than it did at the beginning of the course. Tomorrow we will only have two weeks left before we leave!!
The weather here is transitioning very fast between summer/fall and winter. Just a couple of weeks ago it was mid twenties and shorts and t-shirt weather now it is struggling to make double figures. The days are shortening and the treees are starting to loose their leaves. They would expect to have their first snow within the next month and in Boston once down it is there to stay for winter. You suddenly understand the difference between a temperate climate like NZ and a continental climat like the US, it is the seasonal extremes that differentiate the two.
Today one of the cases we had was on the FBI and how they were found short after 11-Sep-2001 (911 in their speak) terrorist attacks on the twin towers and pentagon. In the wake of this attack the FBI had to re-invent themselves  and no redefine and expand their intelligence capability as well as their traditional law enforcement role. In attendance at the case was the FBI's head of National Security. A recent interview with him has teh following to say:

After 20 years with the CIA, Phil Mudd joined the FBI in 2005 as deputy head of the Bureau's National Security Branch, tasked with transforming the FBI into a domestic intelligence agency, more like Britain's MI-5. In this interview, Mudd discusses his work at the FBI, progress to date, the FBI's new paradigm for preventing terrorism and the nature of the domestic terror threat. This is an edited transcript of an interview conducted June 2, 2006.
He was an interesting, animated and thought provoking individual.
In the afternoon it only got better. HBS had arranged for the Director of the FBI, Robert Mueller to speak to us. There are 170 odd people on the Advanced Management Program and we all filed into a different lecture theatre than normal, presumably because it was underground and had only two entrances/exits. There was A LOT of security present. If John Key was here he would have had an inferiority complex. Robert is the 6th director of teh FBI (J Edgar Hoover hogged the role for nearly 50 years!!).

Mueller www.fbi.gov/libref/directors/directmain.htm joined the FBI on 4 September 2001, so things got very busy very quickly for him post 911!! He spoke very candidly about how the old metrics for measuring the success of the FBI was around catching criminals while in the new post 911 world it is around having no more terrorist attacks on US soil. This is quite a different focus when you think for the most part that law enforcement is reactive and for prevention to work it has to be reactive.
What was really enlightning and to a large degree reinforced what we have already learned (or knew) is that the issues involved in changing the focus and mission of the FBI are very similar to any organisation. Jost for the record the FBI has 32,000 employees, of which 13,000 are special agents and they have a budget of US $7.5b per annum.He spoke a lot about changing the organisation and repioritising what they do. Their priorities are now:
1. Protect the United States from terrorist attack.
2. Protect the United States against foreign intelligence operations and espionage.
3. Protect the United States against cyber-based attacks and high-technology crimes.
4. Combat public corruption at all levels.
5. Protect civil rights.
6. Combat transnational and national criminal organizations and enterprises.
7. Combat major white-collar crime.
8. Combat significant violent crime.
9. Support federal, state, county, municipal, and international partners.
10. Upgrade technology to successfully perform the FBI's mission.