My MBA program finishes up today. This is great news. Why, you ask?

First off, despite recent evidence to the contrary, it shows that if you publicly declare a goal…you’re more likely to keep it. Secondly though…and more importantly…I’ll finally have time to…

*Blog my way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I have been waiting years to finally…what? {whispering in ear}. Oh. What about The Joy of Sex? Martha Stewart’s Homekeeping Handbook? The Huffington Post’s Guide to Blogging?

*Travel around the country to Starbucks stores which used to be open, but are now closed.

*Write a tell-all novel about my two years as an IT professional in the free-wheeling subprime mortgage industry circa 2003. You’d be amazed how easy it is to approve borrowers who have no business being approved with just a tiny, well-placed snippet of code.

*Work on getting 1,000,000 followers on Twitter. Shouldn’t be tough, once I get the porn spammers, network marketers, and Lost nerds on board.

*Plan and execute a violent coup against my HOA newsletter’s editor. She’s had it coming for nearly eight years.

*Become the 1950s-era housewife Capt. UberHusband never realized he never wanted. Our washing machine’s already on the blink, so the technology hurdle is partially crossed.

*Work on integrating my not-yet-patented “Cash for Clunkers” early retirement program into Fortune 500 businesses. If your manager gets less than 18 MPG and has been around for at least 25 years, he or she is eligible!

Oh, and the federal minimum wage goes up today…ka-ching! Just in time!

**Normally I’d post this sort of thing over at stratechick dot com…but I’m waiting for iLife ‘09 to show up so I can spruce the place up a bit. Until then…here you go.**

A few weeks ago, I and several of my Strategic Management teammates received an email from our instructor. He had bumped into a VP of something or other for Starbucks, and as we were all working on Strategic Planning Notebooks for Starbucks, he inquired as to whether or not she’d be interested in taking a look-see at our final deliverables. She agreed, and he passed on her contact information to us to set up meetings with her. This would all be done independent of our actual class, and wouldn’t have any impact on our grades. Totally optional.

One of my teammates forwarded me the email and asked me if I’d be interested. “Depends on how our final SPN looks,” I replied. I’ll admit though, I was intrigued. I lust (and no, that isn’t a dramatic overstatement) for honest, intelligent, and informed feedback on my work…both professional and academic. I’m not looking simply for an “atta girl” though, I want to hear true constructive feedback.

A couple of weeks after that initial email, the Starbucks teams received an update on the meeting requirements…if we wanted to take the meeting. Basically, the VP had indicated she was very busy and didn’t have time to read our strategic planning notebooks, so we’d need to arrive with an Executive Overview and she’d review them all during the same meeting.

Hmm.

I was really disappointed by this, and let me tell you why. You see, I think one of the fundamental problems in business today is that everything is an Executive Overview. Managers and employees can talk about the Big Picture and think Outside the Box all they like, but at the end of the day…it’s the details that determine whether a project or a business fails. My team had spent twelve weeks performing several different strategic planning activities and had produced a rather comprehensive document. I was proud of it. To take it and whittle it down to an Executive Overview (really – what does that even mean?) was an insult both to my team and to the hard work we’d done. If she couldn’t take twenty minutes to read our SPN, then clearly she’s too busy to provide us with any truly meaningful feedback. Not everything should be scanned at the 35,000-foot level.

I was also disappointed because I think the woman (and Starbucks) missed a great opportunity to mentor some enthusiastic business students. Also of note, she did a fantastic job of actually demotivating said business students by minimizing their efforts to make her day easier. If she didn’t want to truly engage herself in this process, why on Earth did she say yes?

When I grow up, I won’t be that kind of manager…or executive. If I don’t have time, I won’t do something. If I say I will though…I will follow through.

So you see, there’s this doctoral student in education at Ohio State University who surveyed 219 of her own school’s students and determined that “those who used Facebook achieved lower grades”. The humor of that story being tagged as “entertainment news” did not elude me, by the way. Oh wait, that’s not right…what she actually said was:

“We can’t say that use of Facebook leads to lower grades and less studying – but we did find a relationship there…There’s a disconnect between students’ claim that Facebook use doesn’t impact their studies, and our finding showing they had lower grades and spent less time studying.”

So what you’re saying is…if people are doing something other than studying, then they’re spending less time studying? Wow. Insightful. Thanks to WebProNews for actually providing the details of the study, as I had a humdinger of a time finding them on my own:

On average, Facebook users in the study had GPAs between 3.0 and 3.5, while non-users had GPAs between 3.5 and 4.0. In addition, users said they averaged one to five hours a week studying, while non- users studied 11 to 15 hours per week.

The study surveyed 219 students at Ohio State, including 102 undergraduate students and 117 graduate students. Of the participants, 148 said they had a Facebook account.

The study found that 85 percent of undergraduates were Facebook users, while only 52 percent of graduate students had accounts.

Findings indicated that 79 percent of Facebook users claimed it did not have an impact on their academic performance. In open-ended questions, users said they were not on Facebook enough to notice an impact, and stressed that academics were a priority for them.

Karpinski emphasized that the results don’t necessarily mean that Facebook use leads to lower grades.

“There may be other factors involved, such as personality traits, that link Facebook use and lower grades,” she said.

“It may be that if it wasn’t for Facebook, some students would still find other ways to avoid studying, and would still get lower grades. But perhaps the lower GPAs could actually be because students are spending too much time socializing online.”

Now, I don’t claim to be an academic, but I am a research study junkie. One of my favorite things to do is to pick apart research studies because, truly, you can make them sound however you want in order to push your own agenda or prove your own hypothesis. I could write another six paragraphs about that, but will spare you all the gory details. Trust me. But, the fact that the researcher specifically mentions other factors may be influencing the reduction in GPA completely negates the “outcome” of the study.

I do not claim to be a 20-year old college student either, but I once was. I didn’t have a Facebook account but believe me, back then if I wanted to waste time and not study and procrastinate and watch my GPA suffer, I was going to do it. And, I did. It was called Sega Genesis Golf. The folks who are on Facebook nine hours a day clearly have a different set of priorities than people who don’t have a Facebook account or who use it in moderation. Is that a bad thing? I would argue it isn’t. Facebook isn’t some evil overlord who chains you to your desk and forces you to fill out quizzes about which Nebraska town you should live in.

You see Bob, it’s not that they’re lazy…they just don’t care. I suppose a fantastic companion piece to this study could be titled, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy with a great GPA, but no social skills…virtual or otherwise.” I could argue that young men and women who are in dating relationships in college also get worse grades than their single counterparts, or college students who eat ramen five times a week use proportionately more water than students who only eat it three times a week.

On a macro level, I suppose the “outcome” of this “study” really doesn’t matter much. People are always going to find more interesting things to do when the task in front of them seems uninteresting. Classmates in my MBA program blow off project meetings and deliverables all the time in favor of more interesting things, but when you grow up and get out into the real world, that sort of activity is given the politically correct moniker of Maintaining a Work/Life Balance.

Maybe I’ll have to try that next term…”Sorry folks, I’d love to go to that client meeting…but I need to see if I can find some pieces of art in Mafia Wars.” Better yet, maybe it’s time to start looking at Ph.D. programs.

This week in Consumer Behavior we discussed customer privacy, and whether or not we feel privacy policies go too far or not far enough (both from a consumer’s and manager’s perspective).  Rather than paraphrase, I’ll just copy and paste a snippet of my response:

I’ve always found the battleground topic of customer privacy to be very interesting, because in my experience…people are generally inconsistent with their beliefs. Consumers demand that their personal information submitted online to retailers not be shared with third-party vendors (to avoid the dreaded flood of email spam), yet these same individuals are completely willing to share all but the most intimate of details online via blogs, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, or a host of other social networking sites.

I’ve sat next to people in doctor’s offices who hand out their credit card numbers over their cell phone, completely oblivious to the fact that people might be listening in. People who live in my neighborhood proudly display signs in their front yard indicating Caitlyn and Austin are in cheerleading or football at the local high school, probably not even considering how easy it would be to find out the last name of the home’s owner and do who-knows-what.

With that, I started thinking about Facebook pages and how I know what my “friends” are interested in – to a startling degree in some cases.  Privacy doesn’t really come into play when you’re talking about television shows you like, or brands of soda you enjoy.  Unless you’re weird.

But, while we’re so openly sharing…wouldn’t it be great if you knew what your Best Facebook Friends Forever were truly fans of? I mean, sure I’m a fan of red wine, and Freebirds, and How I Met Your Mother…but wouldn’t you rather read “Snarkwife is a fan of ending sentences with prepositions” in your live feed?

How about…

• Jane Doe is a fan of unemployment.
• John Doe is a fan of passive-aggressive behavior.
• Judy Doe is a fan of parking so crookedly in parking spots that others can’t park in the adjacent spots.
• Jim Doe is a fan of calling in sick to work on Fridays and/or Mondays.
• Jane Doe is a fan of pouring the last cup of coffee at work, and not making a new pot.

And so on, and so forth. I mean really, the options are limitless.

And son of a gun, here we are.

CU and I were talking yesterday, about how this time last year we were sort of in a rushed frenzy. You see, we seem to be in this routine now of going on vacation after Labor Day; more specifically, two days after Labor Day. It really is fantastic to have a three day weekend and then just a couple days of work before heading to…wherever. For us, it has been Hawaii.

This time last year though, things were rather chaotic. Work was in a state of…transition, shall we say…and entirely out of control. I had just started my second semester back into my MBA program and was still experiencing growing pains with that, as well. Now though…work is still work, but school is an entirely different matter. I am not on a single group project this semester, and have already completed all of this week’s required work for both of my classes. It’s amazing how quickly I can power through this school thing when I set my mind to it instead of, oh, procrastinating.

Anyway, things around here don’t seem frenzied at all. Is it possible that I might actually experience the relaxed vacation I’ve been building up in my head for the last six months? Is it possible that once the work day ends tomorrow, I might actually…wind down?

This past weekend was really weird. I had my SIE initiation on Saturday night and fortunately, waterboarding was not in the program. Apparently, it wasn’t that kind of initiation. Instead, we had a buffet and mid-priced wine…and I got to meet my arch-nemesis from my online Applied Research Methods class. This guy drove me insane. I always manage to find the second-smartest person in the class (behind me, of course) and fixate on him for twelve weeks. I say “him” because generally, it has been a guy. For someone who considers herself to not be terribly competitive, I seem to be…terribly competitive. Anyway, Arch-Nemesis and I had a good time bagging on the professor and our insane workload in the class.

Where was I going with this?
(more…)

So – as soon as I turn in my team’s simulation write-up in half an hour (there’s a fun story behind that, too), I am officially done with the Fall semester and my Operations Management grade is out of my hands.

I took my final a little while ago and started sweating bullets when about halfway through the exam, I started hitting questions from a chapter which wasn’t in our syllabus. Chapter 14. We covered every chapter in the book but that one. I remember specifically mentioning to CU a couple of days ago that I thought it strange we skipped it but hey, that’s what the professor scheduled.

Needless to say, I panicked…because that’s what I do when I find myself woefully unprepared for something. I was having a tough enough time with the exam (BTW – people who think open book/open notes exams are easy are also on crack) – the last thing I needed was to have to learn about ERP and MRP on the fly.

(more…)

So, have I updated all of you on my marketing class lately? I don’t think so…so here are the highlights in a nutshell.

• One of my teammates sent me an email, telling me she didn’t like my “tone” and I was too “harsh” when I chastised her for completely failing to show up for a scheduled meeting. By the way, she’s the meeting leader.
• It should be permissible to refuse to give someone an MBA because he or she overuses the words AWESOME and HILARIOUS and ends every statement with multiple!!! exclamation!!! marks!!!
• Influence is a wonderful thing…and I’m discovering I have a lot of it.
• When you tell people you want to get an “A” on the project, they assume you’ll do all of the work and they won’t have to do anything except enjoy the ride. Oh, the AWESOME HILARITY when they find out that isn’t the case.
• My quiz wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be – I actually think I overstudied for it. We’ll find out in a couple of days.

One of this week’s “learning objectives” was the concept of social proof. Here’s the Wikipedia definition:

Social proof, also known as informational social influence, is a psychological phenomenon that occurs in ambiguous social situations when people are unable to determine the appropriate mode of behavior. Making the assumption that surrounding people possess more knowledge about the situation, they will deem the behavior of others as appropriate or better informed.

I know for me when I was a little girl, I had training wheels on my bicycle and nothing my parents did could get me to take them off. We moved to another city, and I noticed I was the only 6-year old who had training wheels on her bike. They were off by the end of the day, as I realized it was time for me to be a big kid like all the others.

Another example…several years ago, CU and I were driving down a busy street near our home and saw a dog wandering in the middle of the road. We stopped our car and went to try to get the dog, but everyone kept speeding around us. Eventually, a second car stopped to help. Once that second car stopped, we were amazed at how everyone else fell in line to try to help out this dog.

I asked this question on my class discussion board, but ya’ll are more fun…so, what sorts of examples of social proof have you witnessed – or found yourself part of? I always like to think of being back in high school, when if one friend was mad at you, it wasn’t a big deal. If two were though, all of a sudden the whole gang joined in and didn’t talk to you for two days.

Don’t worry…I’ll eventually get around to blogging about TV last night. :)

Well folks, I have a project team. It was a little iffy there for awhile, as Mr. Three Sisters emailed me yesterday afternoon to let me know he had joined forces with another person the night before, and that person committed both of them to another team yesterday morning.

So I’m thinking to myself…”You joined my team Monday night, and this person committed you to a team on Tuesday morning…so you’re backing out of my team?” Whatever. Good riddance. We picked up a couple of guys (both refugees from my Org Behavior class) and have since decided we need a team-building exercise to help us recover from our team-building exercise. I really thought this process would be easier than it turned out to be…which is funny because I tend to lean more to the side of over-complicating, not over-simplifying things.

Guess what I learned today? You know how annoyed you get when you buy something and then a week later, a “new and improved” version comes out? There’s an actual term for that…”Applenomics” or for the uninitiated, “Microsofticity.” Kidding. It’s “planned obsolescence.” I is edumacated.

Do you ever have those times when you wish you could play the tit-for-tat game, and actually have it come out in your favor?

My Org Behavior class ended nearly two weeks ago, and grades were due into the Student Records office last Friday…August 3. Grades were to be published online this past Monday and needless to say, I was excited because I’m dying to know how I did both on my individual project and overall in the class.

Monday comes and goes…no grades have been posted. Yesterday, the emails start coming in from fellow classmates, all wondering if we’ve heard from our instructor or seen anything remotely resembling a grade. No one had, so we all start emailing and calling Student Records, wondering what’s up.

Apparently, our instructor just blew off the grade submission deadline. One unhelpful representative had the gall to tell me it was my responsibility to follow up with the instructor because even though there’s a deadline, instructors don’t always meet it. So, I did. Here was her reply:

I will try to get them out to everyone before too long. Final grades should be uploaded into Banner in the next few days.

(more…)

I don’t really have a boss in my job. I used to, but in the last year or so I’ve sort of become my own self-directed work team, for lack of a better term.

As part of my graduate management program at the University of Dallas, I am participating in a management development exercise. The exercise is a 360-Degree Assessment designed to give me feedback on my leadership, management, and team skills.

In the 360-Degree Assessment, I complete a survey on myself, and individuals that are familiar with my management style also fill out a survey on me. In this process, typically a boss and three or more coworkers are invited to complete a survey.

The survey input is summarized, and I receive a report on how my results compare to a “norm” group of managers from a variety organizations. I will see how my boss described my management behavior, and I will see how my direct reports and coworkers described my management behavior, provided at least three individuals from each group submit a survey.

I’m sure most of you are familiar with this. I haven’t done one in years as the organizations I’ve worked for in the last 7 years or so didn’t employ this as a performance review process, but I was excited at getting some feedback. I haven’t had any formal feedback since I started this job over three years ago. I think at one point I was told as long as they kept me on the payroll I was doing a good job, but that wasn’t in writing.

(more…)

In case you’ve been wondering where I’ve been, I realize I’ve turned into “that girl”…you know, the one who gets who she thinks has a really cool new boyfriend and then cuts off virtually all contact with her friends.

Except, with me, I got four really uncool boyfriends and have had to hang out with them for the past month. Let me introduce you to them.

First, we have The One Who Sucks Up To Me. This guy was over-enthusiastically enthusiastic about pretty much every idea I had, every plan I proposed and every email I sent out. While the flattery was nice at first, eventually it got…a little…creepy.

I also spent time with The Totally Inattentive One Who Said About Ten Words Our Entire Relationship. I’m still trying to remember what his name was.

Most of you ladies out there will be familiar with #3, The One Who Shows Up Only When It’s Convenient For Him, Showing Zero Concern For Your Needs. He’ll pop in and make some sort of profound statement and the next thing you know, he’s gone.

(more…)

It took a week and a half, but I now have my first classmate I’d like to bitch-slap.

When it comes to school, I’m not very competitive. I truly believe I’m there for the learning experience, and am not the type to randomly jump all over people who disagree with me or put down their ideas in front of others. Really now, that’s just rude.

This week’s Org Behavior unit is on diversity, and how individual differences (age, values, attitudes, motivations, etc.) manifest themselves within our organizations. This woman…we’ll call her “Marge,” relayed a story of her firm and the struggles they experience between the older workers and the younger ones. As a bit of a setup, Marge has already displayed she has overachiever tendencies…and this was before I found out she was a lawyer.

I responded in agreement, as my company also struggles with generational issues amongst the employees. I then shared a specific example, along with why we 30-somethings thought if our 50-something colleagues would just give progress a chance (so to speak), we could replace outdated and clunky proceses with more streamlined processes…and then we could all achieve that coveted work/life balance! I capped off my response with, “Why work 12 hours a day when you can improve a process to reduce your task-mastering to 4 hours a day?”

(more…)

The Unit 1 threaded discussion for my Org Behavior class was a virtual meet-and-greet, where we said hello to everyone, explained who we were, where we worked, what we did, why we were getting our MBA…and then we were also supposed to divulge something personal about ourselves.

Do any of you have any idea how hard it was for me to keep my snark under control? How I so badly wanted to introduce myself as Snarkwife, the regional sales manager for a small paper company in Scranton, PA? I enjoy sexually harrassing my receptionist, making stupid jokes and picking up waitresses at hibachi restaurants. I’m getting my MBA because I want to be able to bring my boss, Jan, to class for extra credit just like one of my employees did earlier in the season. Something personal? I love the Awesome Blossom® at Chili’s.

But no, I had to be professional. I even left out the part about how my main hobbies are watching television and drinking wine. Looking back at everyone else’s responses, I really do look like an underachiever. But then again…we ARE in the virtual world. For all I know, these folks are hooking up to the internet from the bathroom of a gas station…or alternating between saying,”MUST CONTROL FIST OF DEATH” and “Corporate Accounts Payable, Nina speaking…just a moment!” while reading about The Beer Game.

I also refrained from posting on our class message board this morning, asking if anyone had seen last night’s episode of Lost, then initiating a conversation about how whether or not demanding someone kill their father in order to be accepted into a new group is truly an effective form of motivation. Likewise, what were Ben’s individual needs? What personal fulfillment did Ben need in order to turn himself over 100% to his team, the Other White Hostiles? Most importantly, why didn’t anyone go back to the van to get the rest of the beer? I mean, really now.

(more…)

So kids, did you know you can buy textbooks on the internet? That’s right…you can buy them through authorized sellers at Amazon, and you can get them on eBay.

Me? I actually went to the bookstore (that was a fun half-day trip) and bought my used books there…which was great to give me the “collegiate experience” I remember from yesteryear, but it also set me back an additional hundred bucks.

Lesson learned.

And…the first giggleworthy moment of the Summer term…I received an email yesterday imploring all students to read the University of Dallas academic honesty and ethics policies found online at {link}. I click on the link and…dead link. I think my capstone project should be re-engineering their website.

Okay, this is the real reason I’m going back to school:

And by the by, I received confirmation that all of my classes thus far will be applied to my program…so I will be roughly 1/3 of the way through when I start back up. And, I get $750 off my first class which makes the whole thing sound like a “Buy One, Get One Degree 50% Off” sort of thing…but they’re marketing to downshifters like me.

It’s a brilliant idea…I mean, universities are businesses, too. Why pass up on all that potential revenue (not to mention an increase in their graduate base) by discouraging people from coming back, saying the work they did five, ten years ago doesn’t count anymore, or is now irrelevant? Instead…encourage them, woo them, and welcome them back with open arms and 1.2 free credit hours! They’ll be so excited they’ll never notice the exhorbitant tuition they’re paying and won’t blink when the required texts total $450.

Reposted from last week…had to get my bearings about me before officially throwing this out there…

Have any of you gotten to that point where…you’re getting restless with your life…for the second, or third, time? I suspect this is when a lot of married women decide to have children, but since that isn’t in our Master Plan…I have to look to other things.

Not to turn this into a work rant (because really, how unbelievably dull and uninteresting is that)…but in the last year or so, my job has changed drastically and has devolved into a daily series of tasks which honestly, are completely unrelated to my skill-set…to put it diplomatically.

Having said that, the last time I was restless like this…oh…ten years ago, I started my MBA program back in Sacramento. When I moved to Dallas in ‘98, I switched to the MBA program at UT Dallas…and then decided not to continue when my programming class (required as part of my IT concentration, because all good managers know how to code Hello World! in C++) took place in a classroom without computers. No joke…we had to hand-write the code for Hello World! and turn it in. That wasn’t the sort of non-cutting-edge program I wanted to be involved in, even though I had successfully defeated the Calculus Monster the previous semester and didn’t want that effort to go to waste.

Then, University of Dallas started offering MBA courses at my workplace…and online…so I transferred all of my completed coursework there. After six years at that company and three additional classes (thank you, tuition reimbursement), I quit and went elsewhere and…well…life happened. You know how it is.

I recently joined LinkedIn and reconnected with some colleagues from my past, and am a bit embarrassed at where I am compared to them. I’ve never really been competitive professionally, but when you see contemporaries who have their MBAs now and are working in more substantial jobs than you, you tend to wonder if you’ve gone off-course. Generally, I’ll talk myself out of feeling a bit inferior by declaring how wonderful it is to work from home…and that I have flexibility they don’t…blah, blah. After three years here though, I’m wondering just how wonderful, ultimately, it really is.

Which, reminds me of a quote from When Harry Met Sally…and the sort of funky analogy it represents…

Sally: And Joe and I used to talk about it, and we’d say we were so lucky we have this wonderful relationship, we can have sex on the kitchen floor and not worry about the kids walking in. We can fly off to Rome on a moment’s notice. And then one day I was taking Alice’s little girl for the afternoon because I’d promised to take her to the circus, and we were in the cab playing “I Spy” – I spy a mailbox, I spy a lamp-post – and she looked out the window and she saw this man and this woman with these two little kids. And the man had one of the little kids on his shoulders, and she said, “I spy a family.” And I started to cry. You know, I just started crying. And I went home, and I said, “The thing is, Joe, we never do fly off to Rome on a moment’s notice.
Harry: And the kitchen floor?
Sally: [sadly] Not once. It’s this very cold, hard Mexican ceramic tile.

(more…)