On Friday I taught in the program I cannot talk about. After almost every event within a day, whether it be a panel, lecture, case, etc., we have a period of reflection and sharing. First students consider alone the theme and content of the event and then they share their thoughts with each other in a moderated discussion. A few observations on reflection and sharing:
Students demonstrate the most understanding of the subject after reflection
Students frequently offer more sophisticated points than raised by the teacher
Students are more likely to show their weaknesses and real concerns about a subject
If you would like to try this in a learning setting, this article by two professors at HBS provides some research and findings to support the use of reflection and sharing. An abstract of the paper referenced is below.
"Research on learning has primarily focused on the role of doing (experience) in fostering progress over time. In this paper, we propose that one of the critical components of learning is reflection, or the intentional attempt to synthesize, abstract, and articulate the key lessons taught by experience. Drawing on dual-process theory, we focus on the reflective dimension of the learning process and propose that learning can be augmented by deliberately focusing on thinking about what one has been doing. We test the resulting dual-process learning model experimentally, using a mixed-method design that combines two laboratory experiments with a field experiment conducted in a large business process outsourcing company in India. We find a performance differential when comparing learning-by-doing alone to learning-by-doing coupled with reflection. Further, we hypothesize and find that the effect of reflection on learning is mediated by greater perceived self-efficacy. Together, our results shed light on the role of reflection as a powerful mechanism behind learning."
I plan to continue to use reflection and sharing in my traditional classrooms starting in the fall.
You may recall last week's post, "An Observation on Thinking", in which I speculated on the way thinking evolves. My hypothesis was mathematics--computer science--artificial intelligence--cognitive learning, based on examining the lives of several great thinkers.
"Computational creativity is a multidisciplinary endeavour that is located at the intersection of the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, philosophy and the arts....The goal of computational creativity is to model, simulate or replicate creativity using a computer, to achieve one of several ends.."
Not surprising, the computers are being programmed to think in ways very similar to the founders of AI, Minsky and Simon.
Fast Company has an interesting post on Flannery O'Connor's cartoons. Ms O'Connor was also a very accomplished author, which provides additional data for the thesis that creative people frequently master a second art.
This quote from O'connor I found particularly interesting.
“For the writer of fiction,” she said, “everything has its testing point in the eye, and the eye is an organ that eventually involves the whole personality, and as much of the world as can be got into it.”
"This way of seeing she described as part of the “habit of art,”. She used the expression [habit of art] to explain the way of seeing that the artist must cultivate, one that does not separate meaning from experience. And like any other habit, it has to be developed over time and through practice."
The notion of seeing is a central theme in creativity, both literally and figuratively. Many geniuses say that they saw their solutions in their mind before they tried to articulate them. This suggests that creativity involves a more basic process such as seeing rather than language or writing.
The notion of not separating meaning from experience is also a powerful tool. If one takes pictures of dolphin swimming in the ocean, the experience is the photography. If one merely observes the dolphins there are opportunities to derive many "meanings". I think this is part of the reason I do not like videos. In the video the experience of the story is choreographed to make the writer's point. If I am just observing life real time I create the meaning.
The Physics arXiv Blog had an interesting story, "Poverty Escape Plan Revealed by Computer Model of Economic Vicious Cycles". Georg Goerg a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University has developed a model that shows how disease spreads through a country and the resultant effect on that economy. The basic assumptions is that disease debilitates people to the point where they cannot work or they work less days, resulting in less economic output for the country and poorer individuals. As the economy shrinks there are less healthcare resources available, which leads to more sick, poor workers in a vicious downward spiral of less healthcare, less economic output and more poverty.
Goerg's model tested two curative scenarios:
A large injection of outside capital
"the country increases the proportion of GDP it spends on healthcare, to bootstrap its own way out of the cycle"
Goerg's "conclusion is that increasing the proportion of GDP spent on healthcare cannot release a country from this kind of poverty trap. Indeed, it can do the opposite and trigger a vicious cycle of decline." Effectively, a poor country cannot deal effectively with a health emergency, such as an epidemic, using its own resources. The likely outcome will be a marked decline over a long period in GDP which will reduce healthcare for a long period.
The preferred approach to address healthcare in poor countries, as shown by the model, is to seek out a large amount of foreign capital. Alternatives might include:
Development aid
Sale of minerals (Saudi Arabia)
Sale of future mineral deliveries (Venezuela)
Organizing large pools of private capital for "public good" (Israel, Chile)
Regardless of how the pool of capital is put together, it is not necessarily the case that a healthcare program has to be administered by a national government (even if they raised the capital).
Last week I did two mentoring events. The first event was the Women's Success Summit, produced by Miamian Michelle Villalobos. 300 women and me. What could be more fun? In a 30 minute session anyone in the audience had 30 seconds to describe their business and their problem and then I was supposed to give advice. Out of 7 questions, three people asked for specific solutions to problems. The other four had ideas and wanted to know how to turn them into a business. The three with specific questions could benefit from a mentor. The other four souls should probably come to one of my workshops on how to develop a business concept. They were pre-mentor.
The second mentoring event was the monthly session hosted by the FIU Pino Entrepreneurship Center. This group was all male except for my good friends Lauren and Karyne from Pino Center who organize this event. Four thirty minute mentoring sessions. 1 person had a specific question (his second startup). One person had a fully developed business concept and he wanted to stress test it before he talked to investors. That's fair and I think he got some good advice. 1 person without a business concept (workshop candidate) and one wacky person idea that will never, ever get done. . Doable, but one in a billion. Not suitable from mentoring.
As Fast Company said:
"There are plenty of people who'd love to help you with your business; you just have to ask, but they don't have time to waste helping you figure out what your actual problems are. Get the most out of a potential mentor by approaching them with specific questions you've already identified and they've probably answered for themselves."
I struck out the point about "time wasting". Mentoring is not a billable hours business, but you get more benefit from the mentor the more well thought out the question. If you are not sure whether you have a business concept, you probably don't and you are a workshop candidate.
I would like to do a radio show where people call in with questions about how to grow their business. Weekly co-hosts with specialties. Sponsor/advertising inquiries welcome.
Occassionally I find someone who helps me to resolve issues or conflicts that trouble me. This post from 2009 about George Polya, "George Polya-Problem Solving and Heuristics", is a case in point.
A recent story in Slate about Susan Sontag answered several questions that I have been pondering in recent years. Sontag was an acclaimed 20th century novelist and essayist. We shared a liberal period in the early 1970s, but for Sontag it was a life calling whereas for me it was just a period on the way to a more conservative outlook. I find it somewhat amusing that I draw so much insight from a gay, Jewish woman, which probably shows that none of that is relevant. Perhaps our common interests in philosophy, writing and teaching explain this "bond", but I think not. I suspect that we have just thought about some on the same questions and now I can probably consider some answered or at least resolved.
This description of Sontag I found particularly interesting.
"Sontag’s ongoing investment in the development and definition of herself always seemed less like self-obsession than a kind of existential industriousness....you get the sense of a person who was always working toward an ideal version of herself. The ideal changed in its particulars over time, but the ideal of change remained constant... a useful reminder that being a pseudo-intellectual is a necessary stage on the way to being a nonpseudo-intellectual, and that the two classifications aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. Being an intellectual is often, after all, a matter of getting away with trying to be seen as one."
"The ideal of change remained constant" is comforting. While such an expression sounds like a cliche, it is not so mundane when the change is in large part in your mind and how it works. How to become an intellectual I also found to be very telling.
This description of her erudition was insightful for me.
“As I listened to her clear, authoritative, and direct responses to my questions, it was obvious that she had attained the conversational goal that she had set for herself many years before.” The idea of this persuasive fluency of speech as something constructed, something striven for and achieved"
This is the standard of speech that any thinking person should strive for. It is an amazing demonstration of discipline and intellect, especially when done everyday.
This quote about curiosity is the point missed in the education debate.
"The way in which she positions curiosity as not just a primary critical value, but a primary human value." To be curious is, in the most vital sense, to be serious."
Curiosity is the driving force behind all discovery but rarely used as a pedagogical device in most schools.
I think this quote from Sontag provides great insight into writing.
"I feel I’m changing all the time, and that’s something that’s hard to explain to people, because a writer is generally thought to be someone who’s either engaging in self-expression or else doing work to convince or change people along the lines of his or her views. And I don’t feel that either of those models makes much sense for me. I mean, I write partly in order to change myself so that once I write about something I don’t have to think about it anymore. And when I write, it actually is to get rid of those ideas. That may sound contemptuous of the public, because obviously when I’ve gotten rid of those ideas, I’ve passed them on as things that I believe— and I do believe them when I write them— but I don’t believe them after I’ve written them because I’ve moved on to some other view of things, and it’s become still more complicated ... or perhaps more simple."
I like the concept that writing rids one of the ideas and also that the ideas can evolve. This idea of evolution explains a great thinker like Friedrich Hayek, whose views on certain subjects change profoundly, in my opinion, over his lifetime. Of course, the talent shows itself in differentiating the half-baked idea from the foundational thinking.
Note: In the related article below, Sontag's views on photography are interesting. She explained my lack of interest in taking photos, something which I had been pondering for 40 years.
The HBR Blog Network had an interesting article yesterday by Nilofer Merchant, "Is Bias Fixable". She basically stated that bias in thinking is a function of how one frames the question or issue. This view is basically correct and a valuable insight. However, to understand bias in order to reduce its effect on our thinking (and behavior), a few observations may be helpful:
Language itself is baised. There are several examples of languages that do not have a concept of time and direction (left, right, etc.), many that use different numbering systems (for example Roman Numerals which attribute importance to 50 and 500) and many that have no calendar (365 day year). God, heaven and after life, if they are used, are expressed in a wide range of ways. Recognizing the bias in language, which establishes arbitrary constraints, is one method to relax assumptions and properly frame the question.
Many say that innovation is based on putting together existing ideas in new ways. This concept is easily understood in terms of the mathematical concept of set theory. Recognizing new common elements in different sets forms the basis of the innovative idea. Conversely, how one defines a set creates the bias. Racial predjudice, a classic case of bias, is nothing more than assuming that one person's characteristics represent the characteristics of a group or set of people. Google illustrates this point in a more positive way. Before Google everyone knew that to be in the set of "businesses" a company had to charge the customer to earn revenue. In a meaningful way Google just redefined the set of "businesses" by not charging the end user.
Our knowledge is a combination of our education and perceptions proceesed through a group of cognitive proceeses. Education is inherently biased, as shown, for example, by the very different histories of WW II written by the Chinese, Japanese and Americans. What people tend to forget is that their individual perceptions are predjudiced or biased by the mere fact that there is a sole interpreter--you.
Daniel Kahneman in Thinking Fast and Slow shows that the brain is wired to reduce its energy consumption, which tends to make us use what we already know rather than constantly be questioning existing information. Effectively, the brain is designed to be biased in order to conserve energy.
I do a case each semester with my students where I ask them to change one assumption about the original Model T Ford in order to create a new industry. Students quickly come up with car paint and accessories. Better students come up with taxis and auto insurance. The "genius" answer (provided by a student) is fast food restaurants. Don't change the assumption about the car. Change the assumption about how the owner will use the car. Our biases become our assumptions and by changing or relaxing the assumptions we have one way to overcome bias and better frame the question.
I ordered my first Kindle e-book reader the week it became available. I switched to Kindle on iPad only to reduce the number of devices I traveled with. However, I continue to follow developments in e-book readers as part of my interest in educational technology and there is much innovation in the space.
Yesterday Fast Company had an interesting story on a new e-book reader from Readmill. The Fast Company story highlights a feature of Readmill which allows you to share your comments and highlights of a book with other readers (and perhaps the author) to enrich the reader's understanding through dialogue, thereby creating a social community for the book and the readers.
That's a nice idea but what really caught my attention were three key points which exemplify excellent entrepreneurship:
Rather than taking the Amazon approach of using e-book readers to sell books, Readmill started with the more fundamental question of how can an e-book reader enhance the reading experience for the reader. Starting with the question framed correctly is a key to entrepreneurship that finds large market opportunities.
Readmill is a free app for iPad and iPhone and soon will be available on Android. The company plans to generate revenue by selling data on how the books are read to publishers using the commentary data captured in the social community. I have many times advocated for a business model where the product is free and revenue is derived from re-selling usage data to interested companies. Readmill is one of the first companies that I know of to use this model.
Readmill describes their product as creating a social community, which is the rage today and probably an easy way to explain the product to investors. However, I see Readmill at the forefront of a more important trend--curation of information. As I have posted many times, with the vast amounts of information produced on the web, the challenge is in curating that information for an individual user. Suppose we have a complex book like a book by Michael Porter, FA Hayek or Descartes. Where would you go today for help to better understand it. Wikipedia, Goodreads and other traditional sources do not provide in depth information for better understanding. In 2-3 years I think everybody might go to Readmill first, to search the "community" feed on the book to find curated information--specific to the need, expert commentary and easily found. Imagine the benefit of reading Michael Porter or the leading authority on Descartes interpretation of a highlighted passage in a book. In my opinion that is the real potential of Readmill. (Previous posts on curation of information are here and here.)
I do not know if Readmill will be a commercial success. For example, Inkling and Oxford University Press have really good e-book readers with a strong feature set. However, I think that if Readmill can continue to enhance the quality of the curation of the reader commentary to become the definite source on books, then I think that they have the potential for a sustainable differential advantage in the e-book reader space.
Seems to be the week for good articles from Forbes.
Today's story,"This Guy Left Google To Put The Power Of Big Data Into Small Classrooms", actually covers the much more important subject of personalized learning. Personalized learning uses data from a child's computer usage to determine how a child learns best--videos, books, lectures, projects, etc.--based on their test results and then uses this analysis to provide more course material in the preferred format to the child in all subjects. At a more "advanced" stage personalized learning determines the preferred formats of the best students and provides this format by subject to all students.
The Forbes article discusses the new non-profit venture of Prasad Ram, a former senior Google executive who founded Gooru. The goal of Gooru is to:
"to find the best online learning resources, to collect metadata and analyze your learning habits in order to use predictive technology to suggest the best resource for the future" [learning]
The Forbes writer incorrectly states that this approach is the only example of applying computer technology to personalized learning. There are several examples although some of the projects are not publicly disclosed. Where Gooru is interesting in their approach is that they let the classroom teacher filter the proposed content to presumably better match the student (than the results of the analytics). The approach has the benefit of garnering support from teachers, teacher unions and government. This approach is less threatening than a more student centric approach where the analytics alone determine the student content. Hopefully Gooru will do some evaluation early on to determine if the students do better with or without the teacher filtering. Such an evaluation might also be valuable to fine tune the predictive analytics.
Anyone interested in the future of education, learning and computer applications in these areas should be following "personalized learning". The Forbes story was sent to me by @john_menezes.
I have written several times on why I teach. My favorite post is "A Proud Professor" about a student that went to Rwanda to work with children.
A former student wrote to me over the weekend. He said his three year old business now had revenues of $xx million and that he thought $100 million in revenue was a realizable goal. That was nice, but what made me feel even better is that he is starting a foundation in his home country of the Dominican Republic to focus on either housing or education.
There are two choices for how to combine entrepreneurship and socially beneficial activities, as explained in this post--"Social Entrepreneurship vs Corporate Social Responsibility". I think either approach is worthwhile and this student has chosen corporate social responsibility. My advice to him on starting the foundation was:
Focus on a single social issue
Prepare a plan similar to what is done in a for-profit company
Plan to partner for additional funding in order to achieve scale
An excellent example of the corporate social responsibility approach is the Zamora Teran Foundation in Nicaragua, which is funded in part by the owners of Banco Lafise.
This summer I have been reading a lot about the design process in preparation for my new fall seminar--Entrepreneurship, Design and Thinking. One criticism of the design process and design thinking that I read critiqued the process because it did not produce "creative" ideas. My immediate reaction was that no process produces creative ideas and many of the notable developers of business processes, such as Michael Porter and Alexander Osterwalder, never discuss the best way to think to utilize their process. Further thought lead me to investigate how one should think to produce original ideas.
To better understand how to think better, I read four books:
Simon and Minsky write about thinking from the prospective of their early work in artificial intelligence. Simon is a Nobel Prize winner and Minsky is a legendary professor at MIT who founded their Artificial Intelligence Lab. Duggan's book is the easiest read and outlines a new way to think about strategy. The Art of Design is perhaps the most comprehensive book on thinking creatively and covers subjects like critical thinking in an easily understood way. All of these books are worth reading but if I had to pick one it would be The Art of Design. Go Army!
The common themes in all the books to think better and more creatively include:
Ask the right question--one cannot solve a problem well until one frames it properly. Remember Einstein's response to how to solve a life threatening problem in an hour, "spend 55 minutes on identifying the correct question and then 5 minutes on the solution".
Question the key assumptions and "facts". Facts reflect the predjudice of the observer, which raises doubts about how accurate they are.
Creativity is a process of discovery where previous experiences are put together in new ways.
The ability to draw on experiences across multiple disciplines frequently produces the new idea. Simon won his Nobel Prize in economics but then investigated artificial intelligence and ended his career as a professor of psychology.
Underlying all of the writers' thoughts is the concept of humility. Both Simon and Minsky are acknowledged geniuses and the author [unkown] of the Art of Design is one of the best academic writers I have ever read. Yet they all caution against the danger of previous learning in favor of an approach that requires a problem to be addressed in a way that is free of assumption. Interesting to me, all the writers reference Buddhist thought, which perhaps explains their underlying belief in the importance of humility as the foundation for better thinking.
None of the four ideas above are original and their origins can probably all be traced back to Plato, Socrates and another hundred subsequent genius like thinkers. It is, however, noteworthy that so many geniuses have thought about and written on thinking and creativity and the conclusions are very similar.
The Pino Center for Entrepreneurship at FIU, where I am a Board member, recently relocated off campus to Brickell Avenue in downtown Miami. With this change has come a new approach to workshops. Now Pino will offer lunch time workshops from 11am-1pm.The first workshop will be held on Friday, September 13.
I will be the speaker at this first workshop and the topic is how to develop an effective growth strategy. The topic will be relevant to companies from napkin stage to $30 million in annual revenue and examples will be drawn from both the non-profit and for-profit sectors. Very practical workshop with little theory.
I have been re-thinking the whole process of business concept development and will be presenting some new ideas since my book, Billion Dollar Company, was published in 2010. I now have a more formalized approach to identifying the opportunities that create large companies. If you have not heard me speak in 2-3 years, it may be worthwhile to come by for a refresher.
More details on the workshop are here. (Pino incorrectly identifies me as the current CFO of One Laptop per Child. This is a previous position.) If you are not familiar with FIU Downtown, the address is 1101 Brickell Avenue, Miami, FL 33131. The fee, which includes lunch, goes to Pino.
I also do workshops and training sessions outside of universities and would welcome the opportunity to speak to groups, companies and organizations. Possible topics include entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship, innovation, finance, strategy, customer acquisition and financial management for non-finance executives. Topics can be tailored for both profit and non-profit organizations.
Today's post is some random thoughts related to IT.
The chart below shows the annual revenue and number of employees for three well known companies. Washington needs to recognize that Google is representative of the future employment outlook and that growth in the economy is more important than unemployment. The economy is in one of those rare periods in which there is a systemic change taking place, similar to the introduction of the automobile early in the last century. More on this topic is in this previous post, "How to Survive the End of the Industrial Age".
My experience suggests that Google+ is moving from an early adopter product to mainstream. People connecting with me on Google+ are no longer just geeks but regular people. Any communications strategy should probably now include Google+.
Do you know the difference between a complex and a complicated system? Complicated systems are "those systems that are amenable to reductive mechanistic
analysis", e.g. budgeting. Complex systems are systems where "the rules are no longer fixed, and the behavior of one component
changes the way other components behave", e.g. entrepreneurship. This distinction in systems is important because the type of thinking to address the problem changes radically depending on the type of system. If these quotes have inspired you to read more on the subject, read the Art of Design written by the School of Advanced Military Studies. In Iraq and Afghanistan the U.S. Army realized that their traditional planning systems where inadequate because the operating environment was more complex than in previous warfare. They identified design thinking as one way to address the complexity. The book also does a nice job of explaining the relationship between thinking, planning and execution, a subject I have not seen discussed much. The concept of complex systems perhaps originated in the early work related to artificial intelligence and was described in writings by Marvin Minsky and Herb Simon.
Recently there has been a lot of press about the startup community in South Florida and Miami in particular. There was the editorial in the Miami Herald "Miami's Silicon Beach", Brad Feld speaking at Rokk, the One Community One Goal report and the Miami Herald-FIU Business Plan Competition to mention a few. All of this activity is good to foster interest in startups here in Miami. There is, however, one problem.
In an article, "America's Leading Metros for Venture Capital", the following chart prepared by Zara Matheson of MPI shows the amounts of venture capital invested by city. Miami does not rank in the top twenty U.S. metropolitan areas. Provo, Utah, Phoenix and Pittsburgh have more venture money invested than Miami.
If Miami wants to create a vibrant community for startups we need to attract professional venture capital firms to Miami. When Israel started its high tech community the government created a pool of funds and then turned the management over to foreign private venture firms. Perhaps the government and the private sector in South Florida need to pool their capital and invite 2-3 venture firms to manage the money for local investment in startups. The venture firms selected should specialize in seed and Series A investments. Early stage investing is very local where firms invest typically within 1-2 hours drive. We do not need later stage firms because more mature companies can attract funding from anywhere.
The other thing that would help is if each local college and university had an incubator, including funding, to invest in student and faculty startups. Universities are a key part of almost every successful startup community. The students and resources of local universities need to be part of any master plan for Miami's startup community.
I always tell my students that they should read the blogs of venture capitalists as a way to easily expand their knowledge of entrepreneurship. Successful VCs are students of new business concepts and the factors that lead to large new businesses. They study ideas and companies from the "napkin stage" through to market traction and scaling. A few VC blogs I especially like for their thorough analysis of issues are AVC, Both Sides of the Table and the posts of Michael Skok.
Josh Ellman has written an excellent post on consumer network companies, "“How will they make money?” is the wrong question". Josh is a Principal at Greylock Partners and formerly worked at Twitter and FaceBook. He cites four factors required to build a successful consumer network:
Is there a new behavior here that you can see 100M+ people doing? Is the network going to change the way people think about the world?
Is the product evolving in a way where people are getting more and more engaged and committed over time? Are members adding more and more content over time?
Will the growth be sustainable? Do new user patterns follow the patterns of early adopters.
If the product succeeds at scale, can you monetize the key behaviors? If one builds a large network it can always be monetized by direct purchases or advertising.
One of my pet peeves is all the silly new network concepts that have no future. I hope everyone will read Josh's post in its entirety and evaluate their new business idea against the four factors.
It has been stated many times that passion is a key to success, whether in business, research or art. Passion can be defined as an intense, enduring motivational feeling or conviction, which extends beyond romance and sexual activity. Passion is one of several emotions we all feel.
Schopenhauer said that art is the physical expression of emotions. This insight is both profound and useful. It is profound perhaps because of the simplicity it brings to understanding art. It is useful in that it focuses the creator of art inwardly on their own knowledge. Maurice Sendak, not surprisingly, said it better--"knowledge is the driving force that puts creative passion to work".
However, why are so few of us able to use knowledge to produce art? Part of the answer is found in this quote from Isabel Allende, "Writing is always giving some sort of order to the chaos of life." Writing and art comes from the processing of emotions and knowledge in order to reach an understanding. Therefore, art comes from a commitment to reach understanding and the commitment is grounded in discipline. Ursula Nordstrom stated this point beautifully, "emotion combined with the artist's discipline is the rarest thing in the world".
While this post focuses on art, the "trilogy" of passion, knowledge and discipline is a recurring pattern in most creative people regardless of their area of interest. The theme of "order from chaos" also recurs not only in art but also in science and math and perhaps other fields.
I went to visit the offices of a friend's new business yesterday. Particularly liked the painting of the Muppets. He told me that he was synching all five of his computing devices so he could work anywhere. Always interested in synching technology, I asked what app he was using. Answer: Dropbox. No new information in that answer. I have been using Dropbox since it first came out in 2008. It is an excellent product with a profound understanding of user interface.
My friend said that his son recommended against Dropbox in favor of Google Drive (formerly Google Docs). My friend's son is 11...11. The son attends a very good private school in Miami where they use Google Drive for all document storage. The son prefers Google Drive because of the larger feature set for collaboration, which is a critical skill for the 21st Century and a very effective learning technique. Points to note--Dropbox:
An 11 year old can compare products and determine which one has better collaboration features
Google's efforts to penetrate schools with Google Drive is giving them the opportunity to shape software/app selection at an early age
If private schools are using Google Drive to facilitate collaboration, public schools will not be far behind.
The most popular posts at Sophisticated Finance over the years have been some posts I did on Excel modeling, which are in the link at left called "Excel Models and Tips". All the posts related to Excel are here.
Some folks sent me the announcement for a world championship of Excel Modeling called Modeloff 2013. This is a cash prize competition to find the best young modeler in the world. Competitors are required to have a knowledge of finance and Excel but statistics also looks helpful.
One of the sample questions from the 2012 competition is here. It is a list of 50 tasks in Excel and the competitors had to identify the Excel command. Also a nice review of advanced Excel commands if anyone wants to improve their skills.
A lot of students ask me what business school they should attend. If they think they have a shot at a top ten school I recommend Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Columbia and Wharton. For entrepreneurship I recommend Stanford and MIT. For students interested in finance, despite my efforts to change their career direction, I recommend Wharton and Columbia.
After the school selection question, everybody asks for advice on their application essays. Application essays require a lot of work for the student and anyone advising them. Recently HBS announced that an application only requires one essay and that one is optional. Hopefully this change will be adopted by all the top 10 schools.
Thank you HBS on behalf of everyone who advises students on their application essays.
