Re-Oriented

When Ms. Duncan began the LGO program in June, she went through a rigorous orientation program - something called the Universe Within that lasted for a week and ended with a trip to some island in the bay where blindfolds were dispensed and much reflecting on blindfolded activities took place... Or so Ms. Duncan tells me.

When yours truly first went to grad school oh so long ago (2 years) my orientation was about 3 hours and ended with drinking on the roof of the building - but then again I was a lowly liberal arts and sciences students so there was less to orient me toward.

MIT stands firm behind a one week-long orientation per degree policy and as Ms. Duncan is getting two degrees (for those of you who have forgotten - an MBA and an SM in civil and environmental engineering) she was in line for 2 orientations - one in June and one when the Sloanies arrived in late august so that she could get to know her fellow Pacific Oceanites - see previous post (as Ms. Duncan did not deign to inform you, dear reader, it is left to me to deliver the news of the Sloan schools failings at geography - there are 6 Sloan Oceans - Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Baltic, Caribbean and Mediterranean - somewhere the MIT administration's 4th grade teachers are pulling their hair out).

There was much revelry and blindfolding ... and building of rafts ... and they rode on a boat through the bay and I got to go ...

Having endured that most horrendous of orientations (peace corps training) I adopt the motto of the less that can be said of orientations, the better... so I'll only mention one more thing that was common to both the June and August orientings.

The Beer Game!

Both less and more exciting than it sounds - in a way it corresponds to that historic Homer quote (the simpson, not the greek) - (the) Beer (game) - the solution to and cause of all of life's (read supply chain's) problems. Ms. Duncan didn't actually play the beer game during the august orientation opting instead with some of her LGO colleagues to go and drink actual beer instead of playing at producing it.

But there is much to learn from the game so I'll try to explain it. However, the best way to figure it out is to actually go and play it yourself - which you can do right here.

For a brief overview, the beer game is played with "teams" of 4 (I use the quotes as there is little actual communication between team members) - a retailer, a wholesaler, a distributor and a factory - together comprising a supply chain for cases of beer - hence the Beer Game. Teams are ranked based on combined final amount of money they lost (the less the better, obviously).

Like many academic activities, the Beer Game - much to Ms. Duncan's delight - was created at MIT as a supply chain management education device and is now played throughout the MBA world and the corporate management education world (Ms. Duncan is also a huge fan of the MIT created Little's Law - which has something to with stats or operations engineering - it may be little, but it's a law - so she tells me).

Pretty much all the players do is fill an order (the retailer fills the customer's order, the wholesaler fills the retailer's order ...) and place an order (the factory decides what to produce, the distributor orders from the factory ...). Everybody starts with 12 beers of inventory. You lose money by having inventory and by failing to fill orders. One other thing - the "customer" is a pack of notecards with an order amount written on them - the retailer flips them over before each turn to find out the customer demand.

Simple yes? Go and play and then come back - spoilers are ahead.

In theory the game is fairly simple, but there are delays between the time an order makes it to the person one level up the supply chain and there are delays between the time an order is filled and the time an order arrives - so if the retailer makes an order in week 1, the wholesaler gets the order in week 3 and the goods get delivered to the retailer in week 5 ... or something like that - you get the idea.

Thus much havoc is created through a bull whip effect that leads to huge backlogs in orders and then huge inventory levels. The different players on the team often get into fights ("Why didn't you make more beer!!" so the distributor yelled at Ms. Duncan the factory operator) because of the madness and most people think that the customers are ordering wildly different amounts from turn to turn.

They're not though. They start ordering 4 for a few weeks and then they switch to 8 and they stay at 8 the rest of the time. This switch combined with the delays and the desire to lower inventory leads directly to the bull whip effect.

Pretty much everyone does horrible. People who have played before and thus know that the orders are just going to be 8 for pretty much the entire time - they often do worse.

There is much to be learned from the beer game - I shall ponder it deeply and come down from my academic mountain later and draw silly conclusions.

Pacific Cranes

So I have a new team.

It is sad not to be in class with a lot of the other LGO students, but I am getting to know my new classmates the Sloanies. The entire class of 2011 is divided into 6 oceans, I am in the Pacific which means that I take all of my MBA core classes with the people of the Pacific. Within each ocean, we are divided into birds, so my core team are the Pacific Cranes. We are a diverse group in many respects. We have...

Jen - former director of admissions for the University of Hawaii business school

Carlo - an Italian who is still somehow running his own business while attending classes

Lynn - from Thailand, she is a wiz at accounting, she is sponsored by the cement company she was working for before coming to Sloan

Jeff - from California most recently, he took class in the MIT Engineering school before coming here

John - went to the Naval Academy, and was working in DC before Sloan

Ramiro - an Argentinean who loves to discuss politics and is somehow related to Che Guevara

Like I said, a diverse group - except that Jeff, John and I were all working for defense companies before coming to school.

This being business school, Carlo made us a logo...

le semestre d'automne commence

Ms. Duncan recently began the fall semester. She's taking 8 classes ... you read correctly, 8 classes. For comparison, during my recent master's program, I took 3-4 classes a semester, so 8 is pretty ridiculous. I can't really tell you how many credits she's taking as MIT is of the opinion that ordinary university procedures are beneath them so instead of the usual credit system (based on the hours of classes one takes per a week) they have a unit system. Ms. Duncan is taking 68 units - which is supposed to mean that she spends 68 hours per week attending or doing homework/projects for these classes.

As Ms. Duncan is getting both an MBA and an SM (another ridiculous MITism) in Civil and Environmental Engineering she has to take more than just the business school core (people in business school at MIT are referred to as Sloanies - for some reason whenever I hear this term I think of Newsies and I picture them as 10 year olds in shorts and bowties and suspenders running around downtown handing out newspapers and singing - I haven't actually seen Newsies but this is what comes to mind).

The business school core is as follows (each are 9 units):

Organizational Processes

Communication

Economics

Financial Accounting

Data, Models and Decisions (DMD)

Ms. Duncan doesn't actually take DMD as her summer stats and systems optimization courses covered similar material. In addition to these 5, Sloanies also have to take either Finance or Marketing (I think my granddad once told that I should definitely take one of these two classes - I didn't listen - perhaps that's why I'm still looking for a job). Most LGO students (no catchy nickname as of yet but some people are pushing for LeGOs) are also taking one of these two this semester (they are required to take at least one sometime during the program) but Ms. Duncan opted instead for more engineering now.

Her engineering courses:

Logistic Systems (12 units)

Design for Sustainability (6 units)

Logistics and Supply Chain Management (12 units)

LeGos also have to take a Pro-Seminar (2 units) "class" which is really just a lecture series with fancy pants business people although they are trying to get the Houston Rockets GM to come speak (also known as "Dork Elvis" according to ESPN's the Sports Guy) so that could be cool.

So that's what she's up against - formidable (say it with a french accent - 4-me-dahb).

Ms. Duncan has promised to post more on the specifics of each class later although she'll likely be less than completely honest (she hates one of the classes but she won't let me say which ... harumph).

In other school related news, tyeliah has finally received all of her grades from the summer semester - she did well. She joked that she has a better GPA than yours truly (a gross insult in this household) which is only true because of MIT ridiculousness. They use a 5.0 scale here. Bah.

In less school related news Ms. Duncan and yours truly moved into MIT student housing - a small one bedroom apartment midway up a very ugly building that I'm sure looked very cool in the 1970s - aka the decade of horrible industrial architecture that looked nice for 5 minutes. We just missed out on having an awesome view of the Charles River but the apartment is fine despite the tiny oven. We bought carpeting from a couple that was moving out - we had to cut it to fit our bedroom and living room - a note to future mover-inners - carpet is a nasty unmanageable beast and used carpet carries with it untold amounts of dust of previous owners that all comes out when you move it in. Ugh.

It was worth it.

A Week and a Half Break

Ms Duncan has just finished her summer break ... it was disconcertingly short - 1 1/2 weeks. We were quite busy - planning a certain ceremony and visiting friends with whom we bonded over various bouts of intestinal diseases during our Peace Corps service.

First we went to Vermont, stayed at a friend's family cabin in the woods, went swimming everyday in an amazingly beautiful lake with a perfect island right in the middle, toured the Cabot cheese factory, went to the Ben and Jerry's factory (no tour as they weren't actually making anything that day - and no free sample as far as I can tell), played cards and other games, cooked out (yours truly built a glorious cooking fire), played tennis, and generally had a fabulous time reconnecting with the people who were too lame to move to Boston when we left DC. There was much rejoicing.

As a couple friends were departing, we learned that they would be returning to the Northeast next weekend to see family in Maine - they invited us along so we ended up picking them up at the airport and driving through hellacious boston traffic along I-95 (easily the most gridlocked interstate top to bottom in the country) arriving at the family abode after midnight, waking up at 530 to drive another hour and a half north to the river, bundling up in wetsuits as it was 45 degrees outside, rafting down the river for 5 hours (an interlude that was broken up by lunch at the mosquito breeding grounds - seriously the most infested place I have ever seen), getting a busted lip from a bouncing oar (Ms. Duncan) and nearly falling out of the raft during class 5 rapids (yours truly - Ms. Duncan dropped her oar into the river to keep me from falling out), driving back to Bangor to attend a folk music festival, driving out to another cabin on a lake, jumping in said lake at midnight despite 45 degree temperatures, sleeping on tiny beds, jumping in the lake again, and heading back to boston.

When put that way it seems like quite a lot.

Business Ethics

One of the things that always amazes me is that for every movie out there, there's always someone who thinks it's awesome - no matter how horrible the movie was. Take for example, Disaster Movie - on the imdb list of 100 worst movies it's ranked by the user's as the 24th worst movie - the only movie on the list to be ranked by more than 25 thousand people - so it's pretty unanimous - but not entirely. An amazing 6% of people gave it a 10.* Surprisingly, very few of these 10 ratings are jokes - unlike the case with Manos: The Hands of Fate, long regarded as the worst movie ever. With that movie, quite a few 10s are handed because of a thorough enjoyment of the unintentional comedy from a horrid attempt at a serious/scary movie. But Disaster Movie is supposed to be a comedy, thus the unintentional comedy vote is largely removed (unintentional comedy is the realm of horrible dramas - horrible comedies are the worst as no laughs at all can escape) - that is to say, these people really liked the movie.** My favorite positive reviewer talks about how it's one of his favorite movies that he can enjoy with friends or alone. He then goes on to complain about the negative reviewers - "perhaps the users that commented negatively to this movie could make a better movie? hummmmm. doughtful."

What's interesting is contemplating the possibility that there might be some movie or book that you love, that everyone else clearly recognizes as being utter crap. For example, I really like this blog post, but there's a good chance that it's quite horrible. All this is just a long pre-introduction to bring up my own introduction to the blog topic using Adam Sandler's Billy Madison, which I was shocked, shocked I say*, to learn had a splat rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I believe history is largely on my side due to the numerous eminently quotable moments in the movie (a favorite of mine being "You ain't cool unless you pee your pants" to which the old woman responds "If peeing your pants is cool, call me Miles Davis." ... on second thought, maybe I'm wrong).

Billy Madison ends with an academic contest between the heir (Billy) and the scheming corporate hack who wants to take over the company. They have a final set of questions. Billy get's his so so wrong - the judge responds (and I'm writing this off the top of my head so it likely contains errors - indulge me) "at no point in that rambling incoherent answer do you even come close to approximating anything that can be construed as a correct response - everyone in this room is dumber because of you - I award you no points and may god have mercy on your soul." You would think it would be over for Billy.

However, his scheming opponent gets a question on business ethics which he of course is entirely unfamiliar with and at the thought of losing to Billy he proceeds to pull out a gun and take someone hostage (I forget who) before he is jumped on by the overweight elementary school principal who wrestles under the name of The Blob!

I imagine some of the people at business school might respond similarly.

Now, disclaimers first. I am truly impressed by everyone I've met in the program. They are all very intelligent and genuinely nice people and I don't think they're going to take anyone hostage nor do I think they'll bamboozle grandma out of her savings so they can buy their kid the latest diamond encrusted tonka truck.

That being said, I still have some qualms about their ethical training.

Ms. Duncan recently finished her first semester in the LGO program and to celebrate they had a BBQ outside on campus followed by some games. People were split up according to the teams they used in throughout the semester (with SOs included). We played the Tie-A-Balloon-To-Your-Ankle-And-Then-Jump-On-Everyone-Elses-Balloon game, a carry an egg on the spoon while blindfolded game, a water balloon toss, a relay race involving three legs, human wheelbarrows (yours truly) and sacks, and a final pie eating contest. No real prizes were awarded and no scores were kept.

Yet rampant cheating took place. Now one way to look at this is that no one was really hurt by the cheating since there was nothing to win so it was all in good fun. Another way to look at is that they cheated when there were no stakes - imagine when millions of dollars are on the line.

*As an aside, I'm guessing that these movies are made for the young idiot male (of which I'm sure there are plenty) but surprisingly men actually give it a lower rating than women and young women give it the highest rating of all. I have two explanations for this - first, women are nicer in their reviewing (as an eg. I give scathing reviews to bad teachers, but Ms. Duncan is much more resistant) - second, young idiot females have much more peer pressure power over young less idiotic females.

**I haven't actually seen the movie - the closest I've come to seeing anything by the craptastic directors who made this movie is Scary Movie where they served as minor writers - I remember the movie largely being horrible and paling in comparison to the great spoof movies like Airplane or Naked Gun or Hot Shots ... for a good critique of these directors see here.

***Just as I cannot say "So it goes" without thinking of Vonnegut, or "forever" without thinking of Sandlot, I cannot say "Shocked" without thinking of Casablanca.

Speed dating

Everyone in the LGO program does a 6 month internship for a partner company. To decide who goes where, there is internship - fest, which is much like speed dating. Each partner conducts an interview with each interested student and then matching happens. The big difference is that no one goes home empty handed.

While I have never done speed dating myself, one of the funniest emails I ever received was from my cousin the day after she had speed dated. She had to take notes so that she would remember the guys and then try to match with someone at the end. An excerpt from her notes is as follows:

" Kamtrivi - Never got to ask him a question

Robert - Weirdo!

Audi - finance dude
David - doesn't care for women preachers or tongue speaking churches
Bill - army, talks out of side of mouth
John - speaks 4 languages, size of 12 year old"*

After getting this email, I have to admit to a little twinge of disappointment that I (having already found my soulmate) would never be able to experience Speed Dating. My cousin started the email by saying that speed dating was a bust, so she perhaps would not agree. But to me it seems that experiences like that are what make life interesting.

I was teaching English in China when I received this email. It made such an impression, that I actually did an entire class activity around speed dating. This was by far my student's favorite activity.

On an only marginally related note, my cousin recently went on a blind date with someone who it turned out she had already met at a speed dating event**. On a creepy scale of 1 to 10, How creepy was it that the guy knew they had already met but didn't tell her because he thought she wouldn't still want to go out (and proceeded to tell her that during the date)?

*The names have been changed to protect the innocent.

**Her notes were "Bob - boring, talks about investments, shrimpy"

Multi-tasking

I have roughly 3 weeks left of the summer semester and it is getting rough. I am pretty much working nonstop and still not getting it all done.

Tyler however has it all under control. Upon returning from a bike ride today, he turned a soccer game on TV, pulled baseball stats up on the computer, and had the baseball game actually playing on his iPod. He clearly has mastered the art of multi-tasking.

Evidence below.