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About me: I'm an unrepentant generalist finding my way in a world of specialists. I started this blog to review books, but I now talk about topics ranging from management to cognition to social software.
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As I’m finishing up my master’s program at Columbia, it’s time to reflect back on my experiences of the past two years. I wrote up an email to Frank Giardini from the comments on yesterday’s post, who asked about comparing the program to getting an MBA, and realized I might as well post my thoughts in public.
I have not pursued an MBA myself, so my perspective is admittedly biased. I’m also biased by the book Managers not MBAs, which points out how artificial the skills learned in an MBA program are when compared to the skills needed to be a manager. That being said, let me extol the benefits of the Technology Management program.
The Technology Management program has a very specific goal - it is designed to give experienced technologists the business tools they need in order to take their technology domain expertise and become successful technology executives. So we took classes in corporate finance, innovation, technology and the law, operations, knowledge management, marketing, etc. These are all standard classes that might be taken in an MBA program, but each class is taught with a technology focus so the examples and the assignments involve challenges relating the subject to a technology organization.
It’s designed for experienced professionals - most students in the program have 8-15 years experience, so the class discussions are grounded in that experience. Instead of theoretical musings, most discussions come back to “When I was in that situation, this is what I did”, which is far more useful in my opinion. For instance, in the innovation class, when we were discussing the phase-gate method of
managing innovation, I was able to offer my perceptions from having gone through a project run with that method.
The other students are definitely a highlight of the program. I have really enjoyed working with and learning from my classmates over the past two years. I also look forward to continuing to benefit from their knowledge and expertise in the future, as we plan to stay in contact via our Google Group and other social networking tools like LinkedIn.
The centerpiece class of the program, in my opinion, is Alan Morley’s class, “Behavioral Challenges in Technology Management”, or Becoming a CIO, as I like to call it. The class covers the financial and strategic tools necessary to become an effective executive and teaches how to synthesize those tools into a coherent plan. See my linked post for more details.
The master’s project itself is developing a business plan and pitch for a technology venture. Some people do an internal project at their company, while others pursue an idea for a startup. At the end of each term, each student has to present their master’s project to a panel of three mentors. They have ten minutes to give their project pitch with another ten minutes to take questions, and they are graded on whether the panel would fund the project based on that presentation. It’s a terrifying but educational experience, as these presentations (whether to boards of directors or venture/angel boards) are what executives face when getting projects funded.
The program also finds each student an industry mentor as a guide, somebody who offers feedback on the project from the perspective of somebody who is already a successful executive. My mentor was Jon Williams, who was CTO of Kaplan Test, and is now the CTO of iVillage. Other mentors are similarly distinguished, generally CIOs and CTOs from different industries in New York. I am extremely fortunate to have worked with Jon over the past two years, as he has been unstinting in sharing his advice and knowledge with me.
I highly recommend the Technology Management program, and think I learned more from it than I would have from an equivalent MBA program. It’s not right for everybody as it definitely has a technology focus, and may be a little light on general management techniques. But it succeeded in giving me new perspectives and new ways of looking at the world, which can only help me as I continue to move up in the management hierarchy.
I went to New York Bite Club last weekend. Bite Club is an underground eating club which serves gourmet dinners in private apartments around New York. It was excellent. I highly recommend it.
It was an amusing process to get into the dinner. I had to apply online at their site, and then exchanged a few emails with the organizer. Then to ensure my seriousness in attending the selected dinner, I had to drop off a cash deposit - it was fairly odd to walk into an office building, go into a random office, and drop off an envelope full of cash to a receptionist with a knowing nod. I was then sent an email with the location, with the warning “IT IS VERY IMPORTANT that silence is maintained while walking through this hallway. All noise can be heard by neighbors and that can bring a lot of attention to our operation, which isn’t going to be acceptable.”
Saturday night finally arrived. I got into the elevator with three other people. We realized we were all going to the same floor, and grinned sheepishly at each other. We walked into a typical New York apartment with the main room filled with tables and chairs, and a couple people working feverishly in the kitchen. We were assigned seating (the organizer had tried to balance the tables with appropriate dinner partners). I was at a table with a Wall Street trader and a manufacturer’s representative. We started talking, but our thoughts were on the food to come.
The night that I went was a 7-course winter tasting menu with a wine pairing (click on any picture for the Flickr set). It was _fantastic_. Comments on most of the courses:
The thing that amazed me was that this was not a specialized kitchen - this was a regular New York kitchen. They brought in extra dishes, an extra set of shelves to hold them, and a table for prep, but other than that, there’s really no excuse for me not to be able to make such dishes myself. Well, except for lacking culinary skill.
Oh, that was the other amazing part - when we inquired as to which restaurant the chef was associated with, we found out that he just does this for fun. His day job has nothing to do with food. He just really enjoys cooking and trying new things, and started throwing bigger and bigger dinner parties until he decided to make it a regular event.
All in all, it was a lovely evening. Four and a half hours of good conversation, while being pampered with a wonderful seven course dinner, each paired with a well-chosen wine. It was pricy, but still far cheaper than a similar dinner would be at a haute cuisine restaurant. Definitely an experience I look forward to repeating as soon as I can raise the funds 
A couple of us in nextNY were discussing the need to have the chance for more in-depth conversations than can be had in the typical environment of meetups and happy hours. And since nextNY is a user-driven organization, we realized it was up to us to make it happen. So Jean Barmash and I are organizing Tech Dinner Salons, with the first one this Wednesday on the topic of blogging. If you’ve been reading my blog and looking for an excuse to come chat with me, this would be an excellent opportunity.
I bought my ticket back to California on Virgin America a few months ago and was really psyched about it. The cabin description sounded excellent, and the fact that they let me pay $25 up front to reserve a bulkhead seat with extra leg room was a big win. Here are some more impressions after flying with them.
The pre-flight safety speech was pretty funny - “If you are part of the 0.001 percent of the population who have never used a seat belt before…” If I flew them all the time, it would probably get old, but the variation on the standard speech (while still covering the same material) was nice.
The inflight entertainment system is excellent. I loved it.
Unfortunately, all of the goodwilll generated by the entertainment system was thrown away completely by the fact that the flight was delayed three and a half hours. It was scheduled to depart at 6:35pm, boarded after 9pm, and then sat on the runway and didn’t actually take off until after 10pm. We didn’t get in until close to 2am Pacific time, and then there was only one ground crew working so we had to wait 20 or 30 minutes for our bags. A friend of mine who had also had delay issues with Virgin America theorized that they get low runway priority since they are a new airline, and that makes sense but is unfortunate.
It actually made me think of the Peak book and its pyramids. No matter how much the inflight entertainment system delighted me, if my base pyramid needs of getting to where I’m trying to go in a timely fashion aren’t met, then I won’t be happy as a customer. So Virgin America has some work to do.
It’s not a good sign for the airline industry as a whole that I ended up thinking fondly of my Greyhound bus experience. The Greyhound may be crowded and slow and sometimes late, but I can literally just walk into the station and hop on a bus 5 minutes later which is wonderfully convenient. For this flight, I had to spend an hour commuting to the airport. Then I forgot to pull my laptop out of my bag before security, so I got pulled over and they had to do a full bag search. And then my flight was delayed hours. I’ll stick to the bus and train whenever possible, I think.
It’s finally fall in New York. It was still in the 70s last weekend, but rain rolled through during the week, and today is a perfect fall day, sunny and in the 50s.
People say they couldn’t live without seasons, but I have to admit that the only season I missed in the ten years I lived in California was fall. I could get the fun part of winter by going to Tahoe, I never liked hot, humid summers, and Bay Area weather is basically spring ten months a year. But there’s something about fall: being chilly but not cold, the air having a crisp bite to it.
I wonder if I’ll be able to make the time to go out and spend an afternoon out in the trees, scuffling my feet through fallen leaves. I used to love heading out to the Arnold Arboretum in Boston at this time of year, looking at the changing foliage, climbing trees and the like.
I took a walk this morning to take advantage of the weather. I headed out to the Hudson river path with a brisk wind blowing through my hair, needing my new fleece for the first time this fall.
I had an ulterior motive for the walk - it gave me an excuse to head up to H&H Bagels. I got some bagels that were still hot from the oven, and let me tell you, having a hot, fresh bagel is a wonderful experience. Wandering through the streets of New York on a beautiful fall day eating yummy fresh bagels? Sometimes my life isn’t so bad.
Speaking of great New York experiences, my friend Sasha organized a trip to go ice skating on Thursday. We were originally going to go to Rockefeller Center, but it was closed for a special event, so we redirected to Wollman Rink in Central Park.
I think I’ve only gone skating once in the past five years or something. But it was a blast flying around the rink and awakening long dormant muscle memory.
I had one of those “Holy crap, I’m in New York!” moments while there, looking out at the willow trees overhanging the rink, with trees and a pond beyond the rink, and the lights and buildings of New York rising above everything. It was another reminder of why I’m in New York - it really does feel like being in a movie occasionally.
I’ve been meaning to post, but can’t quite put together anything coherent right now.
Things are hopping at work as we beta test the new release of our software, so that’s been keeping me busy. Speaking of work, if you want to see where I spend all day, stop by the Fog Creek Open House tomorrow (Thursday, July 19th) from 5-7pm.
Summer in New York also has too many events to attend:
And that’s not even counting the other museums I want to get to. Or musicals or plays I’ve been meaning to see. Or the stack of books I have piled up. Or movies I want to see. Or blog posts I want to write. Or experimenting with “social physics”. Or or or…
I’ve got only a month and a half before classes start up again! Where did the summer go?!
If anybody out there is interested in joining me on one of these adventures (or just wants to have coffee and talk about life), drop me a line.
A couple years ago, I wandered into a small gallery in SoHo and saw a piece of art that I liked and surprisingly could afford, so I bought it. Since then, whenever I’m in the neighborhood, I stop by the Ward-Nasse gallery in hopes of another find. It turns out that the gallery is a non-profit artist-administered gallery, so artists donate their time and work to the gallery to keep it running. I think this is a worthy goal so I try to support them in their efforts.
This afternoon, I stopped by and they were having another sale of their artists’ work. I saw this photograph by Jack Shurtliff that I really liked, so I bought it. As usual, apologies for the terrible photography on my part - it looks much better in person. It’s a black-and-white photograph, and I initially thought it was an X-ray of a human ribcage. Looking closer revealed that it was actually a plant backlit in some way. The ambiguity appealed to me - the initial impression that I was looking at one thing which then resolves to another seems very apropos to this blog. Shurtliff is apparently a member artist of Ward-Nasse so I look forward to seeing more of his work in the future.
The artists’ sale continues throughout the month of April, so I recommend stopping by if you’re looking for affordable art in New York.
While I was down in Soho, I stopped by the Housing Works Used Book Cafe, which I’ve mentioned before. It was extraordinarily crowded, which I ascribed to it being a Saturday afternoon. But when I checked out (I saw the novel Con Ed, recommended by Seth Godin), it turned out that the first weekend of each month, everything is marked a further 30% off. Such a deal. I’ll have to remember that for the future (and am putting it up here so that others know as well).
This evening I went to go see So Percussion perform Music for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich. Long-time readers will remember that I’m a complete nut for Reich’s work, so I was looking forward to seeing it again, especially since the other So Percussion concert I’d been to was enjoyable. Alas, I was incredibly disappointed.
My expectations were clearly too high going in. I’d only seen 18 performed by Steve Reich’s ensemble, a group that has been performing the piece for 30 years, and has it polished to an incredible level of perfection. Their total mastery of the piece and comfort with its rhythms allowed them to move beyond the performance into this whole other space of art and meaning.
Given my recent posts, it’s probably not surprising that my thoughts during the performance tied this back into management. It’s another illustration that no matter how great the plan is, the team must execute for the plan to work. In this case, I know this is a great piece, and I love the ways in which the chords build on themselves and the interplay between the different instruments. And when it’s performed as intended, it’s a spiritual experience for me. But when the same piece is performed short of perfection, it falls apart into a disjointed set of bangings. Execution matters. Experience matters. Deliberate practice matters.
So why did the performance not work for me? A few things I noticed:
Nothing major. No one thing that leaped out at me and ruined the performance. It was a combination of little things that didn’t quite fit.
This relates to one of the points I made in my last post, where I stated that a team can be greater than the sum of its parts. And when everything locks into place, the results are amazing. The musical analogy I came up with is the overtone series. When a chord is perfectly in tune, you can actually hear the higher order harmonics audibly. If any element of the chord is just slightly out of tune, the chord will still sound okay, but you lose the spine-tingling harmonics. Listening to a chorus like the Tallis Scholars is great because they nail their chords and all of the overtones just pop out of the texture. There are more notes being heard than are actually being sung.
Something similar happens in a well-functioning team. When everybody is pulling together and perfectly aligned, extra output just appears from the synergistic effects of the team. One plus one plus one somehow equals four. But here’s the downside - like the overtone series, if anything is even slightly out of alignment, you lose all of that bonus.
It’s interesting to me as a student of management because it demonstrates that getting 90% of the way there means nothing. It’s only when all aspects of an organization are aligned 100% does it really take off. This reminds me of Built to Last, where the authors point out that the successful companies have built the core values of the company into every aspect of the company. Doing 90% doesn’t cut it because it raises the expectations and then doesn’t fulfill them. To take a made-up example, a company could put all the elements of an employee empowerment program in place, but if one manager micromanages their employees, it may be even more demotivating than if the company had done nothing.
I think that’s what happened at the performance tonight. It was a solid performance, and most of the audience enjoyed it. But having seen two perfect performances, where I’d seen the synergistic effect of the performers and the piece feeding on each other, this was far short of that experience. And because it was almost good enough, it was almost more frustrating than if it had been just terrible. I wanted to like it. I almost liked it. But I ended up being disappointed.
The take home lesson is contained in the post title. Notice the discordant elements in your company. If something doesn’t align with the company goals, remove it. It might seem minor, but it could be preventing synergistic organization overtones from forming. It’s like Peopleware’s description of how to build a team - first avoid all the ways in which you can prevent a team from forming, avoiding teamicide. It’s also similar to the Broken Windows theory, where fixing the little things makes it easier to fix the big things because all elements of the system are then in alignment.
Of course, the first step to figuring out which elements are discordant is figuring out what the goals are. Until you know where you want to go, you can’t align everything else. But if you know what you want to accomplish, and you remove all the obstacles, even seemingly minor ones, then great things can happen. You’ll hear those overtones pop into existence and the company will achieve greater things than you thought possible.
I’d heard of local string quartet Ethel at some other event earlier in the year, but never followed up until seeing they were giving a free concert at the World Financial Center last week.
They’re fantastic. They played a variety of new music which suited their talents, from neoclassical works (I really liked the pieces by Marcelos Zarvos, including a premiere of Double Quartet - Rounds) to more avant garde stuff.
The performance itself was in the Winter Garden, a large atrium with palm trees. The quartet started at one end of the hall, played a few pieces, and then started moving around. Their instruments were wirelessly miked, so they could move around at will, and they played from several configurations, including one set with each player on a different atrium side, and another with two of them playing from the balconies. It was a neat effect, and I was impressed with how well coordinated they remained despite the physical distance between them; even though they had earphones, it’s still difficult to stay in sync without visual contact.
After the performance, I bought
their most recent album Light and have been listening to it about once a day, and enjoying it a lot. Amazon calls it the third best classical album of 2006. If you’re a classical fan, I encourage you to check them out.
A month ago or so, somebody wrote me. They had been looking for information on El Nino by John Adams, came across my account of it, noticed that I was now living in New York, and suggested that I check out the New Amsterdam Singers, where a friend of theirs sang. Intrigued, I checked out the website, noticed they had a concert of Renaissance music coming up, and went to go see it last night.
It was lovely. I was very impressed with the chorus. It was bigger than I expected for an a cappella classical chorus, at about 70 singers, but very good. I’d gone to see another chorus earlier this spring and was very disappointed because I’m a snob, so it was great to see a chorus that was unified in tone, with great diction, who actually looked up from their music, etc. It’s definitely a group I would consider singing with if I had time to join a chorus.
I was also impressed with the repertoire choices. I sang in various a cappella chamber choruses for something like ten years of my life, so I’ve done a lot of the standard repertoire, yet I had only sung one piece on the program. Coming in, I had been most excited to see the Victoria Salve Regina, as Victoria is one of my favorite composers, but that piece didn’t work as well as I’d hoped. Fortunately, there was a lot of other great music on the program, including a couple Handl motets, Senfl’s Ave Maria, gratia plena, Tomkins’s When David Heard, and the concluding Buxtehude Missa Brevis. So definite props to Clara Longstreth, the conductor, for finding interesting music in a space I thought I knew well.
P.S. I was sitting in the concert last night, and realized that the past ten months is the longest I have gone without singing in a chorus since my junior year of high school, when I first joined a chorus. I definitely missed it last night. Getting to do something right-brained regularly was good for me.
