Stanford Business, #11, Glad To Be Here...

Last week marked the first full moon on campus since the term officially started. For the Sloans at the Stanford GSB, this means we’ll have been here two months next week. As usual, we had a jam-packed week.

Glad to be Negotiating?

A few weeks ago we saw videos of the Blue Angels starting (and ending) their briefing and de-briefing sessions with these words “Glad to Be here”. The members of the Sloan GSB class have taken them to heart, often starting meetings (or even emails) with: “Glad to be here”.

Ok maybe sometimes it’s said with a knowing smile and little bit of gritting of teeth, especially when we learn that we have even more reading to do for our classes, while we have midterms rapidly approaching.

We’re now entering our “busy” period: this week, every single evening after our normal classes finish, we have our 5-session intensive negotiations class from 5:15pm to 8:15pm. Which leaves us with plenty of time to study for our midterms, doesn’t it? Did someone mention something about a speed-reading course? That would be useful right about now…

For me, I’m just glad that it’s at 5 pm in the evening (which I can make) and not 5 in the morning (which I probably wouldn’t make it to).



Two Parties, Who Wins?
Even before our intense negotiations class started, we got a taste by doing a negotiation exercise last Friday in our OB (“Organizational Behavior”) class. This exercise was called a “two-party multi-issue negotiation”).

For each pair of students, one of us played the part of a proprietor of a family-owned Latin American food processing company; the other became a representative of a big international conglomerate that was going to acquire the company.

Points (“payouts”) were awarded to each side depending on how well they negotiated their position on each of the four issues we had to deal with: 1) amount of cash paid up front vs. paid later, 2) years of non-compete that the entrepreneur will have after the acquisition, 3) number of family members of the entrepreneur that would still be employed after the acquisition, and 4) which party would take on potential liability. Each issue had its own payoff structure, and we weren’t allowed to see the other party’s payoffs.

When I told an engineering friend of mine about our OB class recently and the exercises we do, she asked why we were just “playing games” every day in business school rather than studying!
I can assure all of my engineering friends that these games are actually serious academic exercises designed to teach us well-researched techniques. That they are also fun is beside the point!

The results ranged from shark-like (one party walked away with the store) to moderate (both sides ended up with about the same number of points). We quickly learned who the sharks and the pushovers were in the class (though that’s likely to change rapidly in the new negotiations class).

You might be thinking that this scenario is a little contrived. After all, in the real world, there aren’t any explicit points awarded for negotiating issues. But by being so explicit with the payoffs, it was possible for both parties to review each other’s payoff schedule after the exercise was done.

It was eye-opening. We realized (too late) that some issues were more important to the entrepreneur and not important at all to the conglomerate (Damn! You mean I could’ve negotiated more and the other side would have given in?). Some worked the other way around. And some were, rather counter-intuitively, such that both parties actually wanted the same outcome!

Turns out that by understanding the other side’s priorities, both parties could have gotten higher payoffs rather than negotiating each issue as if it was a zero-sum game.

How to do that? In a multi-issue negotiation, you can simply ask the other side to rank the issues by importance. You’d be surprised how many people are willing to answer that question since it’s innocuous enough.

To my chagrin, I didn’t ask this to my partner in the exercise, and he didn’t ask me, so we ended up with a run of the mill 50/50 compromise. Acceptable but as our modeling professor would say, sub-optimal.

Study Trip to the Valley

This week, we had our first Study Trip, to prominent Silicon Valley Companies. Study Trips are sort of like field trips in elementary school, except they’re for b- school students and we don’t get to go to any museums.

We visited three companies on our trip this week: LinkedIn, Google, and DCM. Our bus left at 8:30 am sharp (Yes, I made it on-time, believe it or not!) and drove all the way to Mountain View (where the first two companies are located) and then back to Palo Alto on Sand Hill Road where the third (a venture capital firm) is located. So what was it like?

LinkedIn. Our first meeting was with the CEO of LinkedIn, a well known business/resume/social networking company: Dan Nye. He told us a little bit about the history of the company. It was started by a number of founders, including one of the founders of PayPal (Reid). Dan was at an enterprise software company before taking over as CEO of LinkedIn, and he spoke about the differences in running a high-profile web 2.0 company vs. his previous jobs. Unlike some companies where the founders left when professional management, at LinkedIn the founders still work closely with the CEO, which has made it a great experience.

Dan wasn’t present at the founding of LinkedIn, but he did tell us one obligatory Silicon Valley “startup” story – on the first day he joined LinkedIn, they were still in an old office in Palo Alto with a leaky roof and there was no one to call for maintenance so they had buckets set up to catch the water. Needless to say, they don’t have that problem today – their offices are quite plusch in a class A building in Mountain View just down the road from Google..

As an interesting aside, he mentioned that his brother worked for Bain Capital in Boston – turns out I pitched my last company to his brother a few years ago with my last company. They didn’t fund us, but as I remember, they gave us some pretty good feedback and advice…small world.

Google. The second company we visited was Google. I would really like to tell you what we saw and heard at Google, but they made us sign an NDA so I can’t tell ya nothin.

HINT: Both of the speakers were women, and both were among the first 20 hires at Google (no we did not meet with Larry or Sergei, the founders). One of the speakers, who spoke about innovation in general and how they innovate at Google in particular, looked a lot like, and spoke like the woman in this video (though the woman we saw had the presence of an in-command corporate VP, rather than the uber-geek presence in this video):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soYKFWqVVzg&feature=related.

Kidding aside, the talk about innovation was actually pretty inspirational, and the stories of how Google iterated from just search towards its final model of "search, see ads, click, and ka-ching!" was pretty interesting.

We also got to eat lunch at the much-vaunted Google café, and even saw Spaceship One, which one of the Google founders bought after it won the X-prize in 2004. Google also added its own version of this prize, which involves giving $30 million to anyone who can launch a satellite to the moon and send a signal back.


DCM. In some way, this was the most interesting of the three stops for me. We met with David Chao, Cofounder and General Partner of this well-known leading Venture Capital firm. He told us how he started to invest in China and Japan in the nineties when people thought he was crazy for doing that and not investing in dot coms. He told us his thoughts about leadership, which seemed to be the result of a lot of professional reflection and self-awareness (something I have to admit I don’t see a lot of with Venture Capitalists; Wonder why that is?).

He said that to be a leader (especially an innovative one), it means that at some point you are going to get lonely. There is always that point when you are out front, going to have to be out front at some point, by yourself, when people are not following you. Eventually (after one day, one month, a year, or 10 years) people will eventually catch on. It can be quite lonely during that time.

He also talked to us about how he used his intuition to help guide decisions. As an example, he mentioned how an entrepreneur once showed him a spreadsheet that listed all the factors they were looking for in a VC. He said that probably wasn’t the right way – you had to go with your gut feeling of who you’d work best with. He also talked about “signs” – little things in the environments that inspire you in some way to follow a course of action. It could be a song you overheard on the radio, or some conversation you overhear that speaks to you. I found this intriguing enough since I had never a VC talk in these terms before. I believe that intuition is the most overlooked factor in making professional decisions which define an innovator and have started writing a book on it. Stay tuned for that.

Full Moon Over Stanford
In my brief year here, I’ve vowed to try to keep up with some of the undergraduate traditions at Stanford. This can be difficult, since graduate students are explicitly not invited to said undergrad traditions. And Sloans are even older than your typical graduate student. A few weeks ago I witnessed the “Band Run” (see earlier post on that). One of my friends who attended Stanford Undergrad, thinks it’s hilarious that I’m trying to re-live her freshman year. For the record, I’m only observing the undergrad traditions, not trying to be a freshman again!

One of the more famous (infamous?) traditions is Full Moon On The Quad, referred to by the student body affectionately as “FMOTQ” (yes Stanford students like acronyms, as does the faculty).

This long enduring Stanford tradition, started probably a hundred years ago, was historically a way for Senior boys to welcome the Freshman girls by giving them a rose and getting back a kiss on the cheek. Since then it has evolved (devolved?), becoming a way for undergrads to cut loose and get over their inhibitions at midnight by making out with other students when they are relatively new to campus.

A few business school students sneaked into the Quad to see what was happening around 11:30 pm. There wasn’t much happening, though there was clearly some anticipation in the air. Bands were playing on a make-shift stage, with groups of students dancing a little and otherwise enjoying being with friends. But no kissing.

I asked some undergrad girls nearby about what was going on – both of them, one of them a senior, one a sophomore (both of whom looked like they might have been straight A students in high school) said that they’d attended FMOTQ each of the previous years but hadn’t kissed anyone. They looked a little nervous about the whole thing but seemed determined to get over their trepidation this year!

By midnight, there still wasn’t much happening. There was one dorky looking guy walking around with roses handing them out to undergrad girls, who smiled sweetly but as far as I could tell, he wasn’t getting anything in return; the girls would take the rose and wander closer to their girlfriends, who were typically dancing next to some of the frat boys, who were clearly not handing out roses but were obnoxiously bragging about how they were going to kiss more girls that night than they had the previous years.

After 12;30, things started to change, slowly. A small portion of the student body was mingling and bumping into each other in the middle of the well-decorated and grandiose Stanford Main Quad, eyeing each other to decide who would get a kiss and who wouldn’t.

By about 1am, things had changed radically. Let’s just say that there was an even smaller subset of students (mostly undergrads with a few shady grad students who sneaked in, I’m sure) out on the floor, doing some serious making out with their fellow students.

At some point, I don’t remember exactly when, the nudists arrived (yes, there’s a group of about 80 nudists at Stanford who I’m told run around campus naked on special occasions like this one). They didn’t actually look like they were naked, since they were covered with body paint that in the middle of the night looked like it could have been clothes. Plus it gets really cold in Palo Alto after midnight, so it would be really stupid to run around campus with no clothes on, or so I thought. When one bumped by me, I took a closer look. Yup, they were definitely naked…no doubt about it.

Now who would have thought Stanford students, among the most academically minded geeks in high school, would be out kissing random strangers on the Quad under the first full moon of the school year? Krutos.

We left shortly thereafter, but I’m sure that for the ambitiously minded, the party continued well into the night! No, I didn’t participate, but as I walked back with some of my classmates I was clearly thinking maybe, just maybe, it might have been more fun to be an undergrad at Stanford than at MIT!

What’s Your Type?
Speaking of a totally different type, on Friday, we had as part of our leadership series, the MBTI personality test and workshop, which stands for Myers Briggs Someting Something. It’s basically a personality test, where you answer questions (used to be on paper during the time of two people named Myers and Briggs; now they’re online) about your preferences in life.
Here are some examples (not real questions, just what I remember being on the test):
Do you like to have your schedule planned out to the minute or do you like to wing it?
Are you flexible with time or do you like to have everything planned out?
Do you get annoyed with people who are flexible with time or do are you like them?

The eventual goal of the test is to classify you into various quadrants of the MBTI graph (are you introverted or extroverted? Are you more likely to be thinking or feeling? Are you perceptive or intuitive?).

The workshop started at 8 am on Friday after a very busy week. Needless to say, since I thought it was an optional workshop, I missed it.

Honestly, I have never been a big fan of categorizing people into buckets, since in my humble opinion, each person has very unique characteristics and doesn’t always fit nicely into one bucket or another. Throughout high school and even college, there are some people who, believe it or not, would classify me as clearly introverted, while others would have clearly said I was extroverted. So, which am I? An E or an I? To quote our accounting professor, It Depends.

Categorizing reminds me a bot of Astrology (I’m a Sagittarius, what’s your sign?) or numerical types in the Enneagram (I’m a 3, what number are you?). Now there are certainly people who swear by these categories, and maybe they’re right. I just tend to have an initial skeptical reaction to them (though I’m willing to be convinced).

By about 10 am that Friday, I was facing the by-now familiar Engineer’s Dilemma – do I go to the workshop, having missed the first half, or do I just wait until it’s over? I decided to get some work done and show up to the next item in our jam-packed schedule – a brown-bag lunch during which some classmates were making presentations, followed by our OB class all afternoon.

Turns out that my MBTI type was “ENTP”, a fact which the teacher shared with the class. Apparently, people in this category, as far as I’m told, are very flexible with time and may even occasionally show up late to things.

The teacher was looking for an example of someone in this category and (as I’m told) called my name. I wasn’t there. A fluke?

Since I wasn’t there, she went to the next name of a classmate whose answers to the test also fit him into the ENTP category. Characteristically, it turns out he wasn’t there either! Only 50% of the four people in this category had bothered to show up for the workshop… which proved to be instructive in its own right.

Hmmm… that's a pretty big coincidence. Maybe there is something to this MBTI thing after all…


SPECIAL DISCLAIMER: the opinions and experiences recounted in these blog entries about my year at Stanford Business School for the Sloan Program are my own personal observations and ranting. This blog is not endorsed by either the Stanford GSB and definately not by any of my fellow Fellows

Stanford GSB, Entry 5: The Second Week: Study Groups, Blue Angels, and Russians

We are now two weeks into classes (Two weeks and One Day since I’m posting this on Monday Night) – that means our “pre-term” is almost over (it’s actually only two and half weeks long), and after some wrap-up activities this week, we’ll move into the real “term” next week, when we’ll have grades and everything.

So here are some notes and observations about the second week. I’ve already given an overview of what we’ve learned in Strategy in my posting over the weekend – click on the link to entry 4 to the right if you’re interested in learning more about that class. I’ve promised to do the same for Microeconomics and Managerial Accounting, but I seem to keep getting distracted with reading assignments and study group meetings and what Professor Flanagan, our Economics professor, calls “merriment and diversions” - so will get to it eventually.

Read more!

#1: Our Study Group(s) Finally Seem to be Humming Along.

Each of the study groups seem to have settled into a pattern in the second week (this is good news, since there are only three weeks in the whole pre-term). During the first week, I heard many complaints about Study groups (no, I’m not telling who complained about whom, that’s confidential); By the second week most of the groups had gotten beyond the initial shock of having to negotiate with each other and started plowing through the large amount of reading and started working on the two group assignments we each had to present.

For example, my study group, after some negotiation, agreed to have some evening sessions in addition to the morning sessions, in order to balance the burden between the “night people” and the “morning people” (Yes, this took a little negotiation, and it’s still on-going!). We even ordered pizza in the GSB building at our first evening session – Round Table Pizza (a California chain with California-type prices - it cost us like $60 for two large pizzas – outrageous. It took me like 10 minutes to explain to the guy on the phone that GSB wasn’t an apartment building).

To counteract all the reading, we are assigning individual chapters to group members, who are responsible for creating summaries so that not all of us have to read every single chapter before every single class. (Oh wait-a-minute, our professors might be reading this blog, so what I really meant to say was that each of us is doing all of the readings assigned by our professors before every single class!)

We’ve also gotten to know each others strengths and weaknesses pretty quickly. For example: B. is great at presenting and PowerPoint, but not so experienced at accounting, L. is great at accounting and Excel but doesn’t like presenting so much, V. is really good with IRR and NPV, but likes to “discuss” strategy A LOT and thinks that 1 hour in the morning is not enough to discuss a single strategy case, while P. likes to keep our strategy discussions short and takes great notes on the whiteboard, but doesn’t like to create notes about the econ and accounting reading, J. is a good all around mediating force in the group, and, along with H., is pretty good at economics, and I’m, well, you’ll have to ask them! Though I certainly win the award for showing up late at most early morning study groups. [NOTE: names have been abbreviated to protect the innocent].

We’ve also gotten to know about each other’s personal circumstances - a few of us are married and have kids, while another needed to go out and buy his Porsche the morning of our case presentations (turns out the seller flaked out on him that day so we he was part of the presentation after all - this Porsche, if he buys it, might appear in the blog again this year I'm sure). Two of us (including yours truly) are still entrepreneurs with international businesses while at school (mine is in Pakistan, while the other is in Russia), so we often have to keep u with late night calls to our companies.

Despite all these differences, or perhaps because of them, we’ve all been willing to listen to each other and support each other [for the most part, except for the occasional yelling match like the one which broke out at one of our 7:45 am meetings one day last week – I’m sorry I can’t tell you any much more about that since I was still in bed asleep dreaming about the reading I had done late the night before ].

So the good news is: The Study Groups are finally working!

Now, for the bad news: Now that we’ve all gotten to know each other and have good habits forming in our study group, guess what? The pre-term is about over and we’ll have to form entirely new study groups and will have to go through this entire process again with the new groups starting next week. Doh!

#2: The Pressure is Off, For the Moment.

Each Study Group had to make two presentations based on “cases” – one for Managerial Accounting and one for Microeconomics. These presentations created the only “real” pressure during this pre-term (though there is lots of imagined pressure given all the readings and problems that were assigned to us, believe you me).

My study group did both presentations on Thursday, and since these were the only formal assignments we had to “hand in” during this pre-term, we’re effectively done. If you saw us on campus last weekend, or see us this week, and if we’re looking kind of relaxed, it’s not just the California weather…it’s cause we’ve already handed in our assignments and oh yeah, the pre-term isn’t graded anyways!

In general, the Sloan Fellows are a co-operative group, rather than a competitive one, at least from what we’ve seen so far. The program is designed to encourage a feeling of “we’re all in this together” from study group level up to the level of the entire class of Fellows, including the families and partners. We’ve had (at least) two alumni of the program speak to us thus far – one was a Sloan ’87 graduate who will be teaching the entrepreneur workshop later in the fall, and the other was John Foley ’97 (see the section below titled “I want to Fly Jet’s, Sir!”). They both told us how the class banded together and helped each other out. In John’s case, the class decided as a group that they would have an explicitly defined mission of “leaving no one behind”.

This is probably true of the two-year MBA’s as well, since they also are taught collaboratively to work in study groups (though we'll find out about them soon enough; they're just starting to arrive on campus this week).

But it seems that not all grad schools are like that. I heard a story from a friend of mine about one of the nation's top law schools. He said that many law school students are very competitive, because of their student rankings, and he offered up the following story: A law student that he knew, in his third year, he was ill and missed class one day.

I found this story unbelievable. So I asked him again to make sure I’d heard him right and if it was true. He insisted it was. This seems to me (to put it politely) just plain silly. I don't know if it's true or not, but if it is, then: NOTE FROM A GRADUATE BUSINES STUDENT TO GRADUATE LAW STUDENTS: Live a little.

#3: The Mind Meld has Started.

Those of you who watch Star Trek will recognize the term “Mind Meld” – but no I don’t mean that we are putting our hands on pressure points on each others faces and establishing telepathic links (though maybe there’s a little bit of that going on, I couldn’t really say) – what I mean is that the classes are starting to meld together in interesting ways.

This is one of the neat things about business school that wasn’t always present in undergrad – since the classes are all about different aspects of the same thing (business), there is definite area of overlap on the edge of each class.

In the second week of business school, we’ve started to see this already – in the Managerial Accounting Case our study group presented, we had to deal with issues of elasticity of demand, a concept from our Microeconomics class. In Econ, we have already started to deal with fixed costs and variable costs, concepts which we are heavily exploring in our accounting class. In Strategy, we started to deal with issues of Total Average Cost and Marginal Cost, which we learned about in Econ.

This is actually kind of neat, though having the curriculum so inter-related means that we can’t really blow off any of the existing subjects. In fact, our same professor from Microeconomics is going to be teaching us Macroecnomics soon enough, so I guess we have to pay attention.

#4: “I Want to Fly Jets, Sir!!”

So on Friday, at the end of our second week of class, we had a motivational talk from John Foley, who was a Stanford Sloan Fellow in 1997.

John is also an ex-member of the Blue Angels – yes that’s the Navy fighter group that does acrobatic air-shows around the country and the world. They fly F-18’s in very close formation, sometimes upside down, creating a dazzling display of technical and human prowess in their air-shows. John was there, along with some of his class members from the class of ’97, to talk to us about maximizing our experience in our year at Stanford.

After doing a stint doing VC work in Silicon Valley (he did graduate form the program back in 1997, during the dot com boom, after all) he is now a motivational speaker who shows video clips of the Blue Angels and uses lessons about how they achieve such high performance as part of his talks.

In fact it turns out that the Blue Angels fly these umpteen-ton, umpteen-million dollar jets within 3 feet of each other– yes that's 36 inches (for our international friends, that’s about a meter) apart. A direct quote: “I don’t think what the Blue Angels do is dangerous, it’s just unforgiving”. I’d say it is extremely dangerous but no doubt a very good example of high performance. I happen to be a student pilot and I wouldn’t feel comfortable if there was another plane within 300 feet of me, let alone 3 feet!

John’s speech was a mixture of inspirational stories, videos of the blue angels flying, and applying some of the principles he learned there and in his year as a Sloan Fellow. The Blue Angels, he explained, were the top one-tenth of the top one-tenth of one percent when it came to jet pilots (I believe it given some of the things they have to do). He drew the analogy that we (the Sloans at Stanford GSB) were like them in a way, the top one-tenth of 1 percent (I don’t know about this; Once you get into the real world and away from structured hierarchies like med school, law school, and the military, I don’t think you can rank people so easily). Regardless of where we fall on the map, his point was that for people that are already top performers, whether fighter jet pilots, top athletes, or in the business world, a 1% improvement can make a world of difference. That was a very interesting point I had never really thought about before.

Sometimes, though, high performance can only come with the right amount of teamwork. We saw video clips not only of the Blue Angels flying, but of how they prepare for their flights. They do an extensive briefing which includes a visualization of every part of the flight; it was pretty interesting. Being a student pilot myself, this made sense to me. They make sure that each part of their flights are coordinated, with what they call a center-point for each maneuver, and verbal and visual marks that they can look at to see if they and there colleagues are off – because at the speeds they go – over 1000 miles an hour, and the distances between them, even a few inches can be a very costly mistake.

How did he deal with all of the reading that the GSB students have assgned? His answer was: "Yes, It's a lot of reading". Then after a pause, with a knowing smile: "If you bother to do it."I thought I detected a wink and a nod there about the necessity of doing all the reading that's assigned to us.

Another element of his personal story that I found interesting was that he wanted to fly F-18’s ever since he was very young, but at each stage of his career, he seemed to get de-toured. They didn’t let him into the Air Force because of some technicality. Then later, in college, he joined the Marines. At first they didn't take his wanting to fly jets seriously, but then they sent him to flight training. After his flight training, they wouldn’t let him fly F-18’s because he was too young. He ended up going on what were considered not very great assignments. But each detour led to its own set of interesting experiences. In fact, one of those diversions, he happened to be on the USS Enterprise (no, not Star Trek, in this case the aircraft carrier) in the Indian Ocean when the movie Top Gun was filmed. He said that he’s actually one of the fighter pilots shown on the aircraft carrier at the very beginning of the movie. I found this to be very interesting because I believe that sometimes we get to where we want to go not by following the normal path, but by following what seem like diversions but turn out to be integral parts of our individual paths to success.

OK, OK, so for the Trivia Pursuit purists, I quoted the wrong 1980’s military movie in the title of this section (“I Want to Fly Jets, Sir” was actually spoken by Richard Gere in “An Officer and Gentleman”, and not Tom Cruise in “Top Gun”).

One thing I noticed is that John probably wasn’t as used to making presentations in front of international groups – he sometimes came across as, well, an American military guy who’s gone into business trying to “pump up” the troops. While this works great in a sales convention in the good old U.S. of A., that aspect of it might not have worked so well in a group that is more than one third international (don't get me wrong, the talk was quite successful overall).

In Example: In one of the videos he showed from his visit to Russia, a Russian pilot was tapping him in the chest, a bit aggressively, saying “Me Pilot, You Pilot”. He took this to mean that the guy was challenging him and when he took the Russian pilot up in his F-18, he did some intense maneuvers, intending to impress on him that our pilots have the “Right Stuff” too. This he proceeded to do by going into a 6-G climb (maybe it was 4-G or 9-G, I can’t really remember), in which the Russian went unconscious for a moment. This struck me as a little over the top and completely unnecessary, but he proceeded to tell us that after the flight he and the Russian pilot, who was a "hero of the Soviet Union", proceeded to be great friends. John spent a lot of time with the guy’s family and they even went to the ballet together during his time in Moscow. The piont of his story was that a relationship could change quickly.

#5: A Russian Perspective

We happen to have more than one Russian in our class and it’s interesting to get their perspective on Americans. When I asked one of our resident Russians about the pilot episode, he said: “that Russian guy probably only knew one or two words in English, so he was probably just trying to be friendly, that’s all.” Oops.

In another example, this weekend, a few of us went out to see the new movie, Righteous Kill, with Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro, about NYC cops investigating a serial murderer. In the movie, there is a tough Russian who, despite having been shot nine times, is still alive, though hovering near death. One of the Americans is tyring to revive the Russian, and starts yelling a Russian word, Svoboda, over and over again, alternating it with what we think is the English translation, "Wake Up! Wake Up!".

Of course, we had one of our Russian classmates, Valeriy with us, who started laughing. The word they were repeating in the movie, Svoboda, had nothing to do with “Wake Up”. He told us it means “Freedom” in Russian. *Sigh*, Hollywood gets it wrong, again.

But then again the Sloan program is pretty unique that way. We can get an international perspective from any major country simply by turning around and talking to someone from that country, since so many companies are represented in our class.

This really started to become apparent in the second week. When we did the case on Wal-mart, we were able to turn to our Korean and Japanese and Chilean friends to find out why Wal-mart’s strategy didn’t work so well in those countries.

That is one of the things I really like about being at Stanford GSB in general, and the Sloan Fellows program in particular.

In fact, I think that is “Kruto”, which Valeriy tells me is the correct Russian translation for very “Cool”!

SPECIAL DISCLAIMER: the opinions and experiences recounted in these blog entries about my year at Stanford Business School for the Sloan Program are my own personal observations and ranting. This blog is not endorsed by either the Stanford GSB or by any of my fellow Fellows.