CEO Exchange

I had earlier posted about people who have successfully transitioned from marketing background to lead an organization. I watched CEO Exchange on PBS yesterday (Nov 12th, 2006). Ed Zander of Motorola and Ed Liddy exchanged their views on putting technology on good hands. Ed Zander has engineering background, worked in marketing, went on to lead software group in Sun and now leading Motorola. You can checkout PBS sites for more episodes on this CEO Exchange series. This event was conducted in Kellogg and I liked the questions asked, especially the one about openness and communication. Read the text if you have time.

Cyberposium @ HBS

Here is my quick update. The symposium was organized by HBS. However, there were definitely out numbered by students from other schools: Babson, Boston U, Boston College and Ivey school from Canada. Google VP: Marissa Mayer did her PR about Google on her keynote speech. No major stuff from Google(except for the nice T shirt I got along with the Google's symposium bag). Personalizable search was more in the lines of "My Google". I was looking for some Web 2.0 and google search integration and there was not any mentioned.

I am not a big fan of panel discussions. Even the experienced take significant time opening their statement leaving very little room for discussion. The energy discussion was awful. One guy took almost 15 minutes bragging how Kleiner Perkins was enthusiastic in funding his efficiency idea.
Did not stay long in open source panel for it was too basic.

Startup fair had representation from very few companies. Why would a company come to HBS and hire for Engineers, QAs? Autodesk, platinum sponsor, was keen to push these positions to future MBAs.

I am glad the organizers cut the entry fee otherwise I would have rued wasting my money on this conference.

exams, ethics and BCAP

Exam fever started a week before the exams began. I enjoyed the CSCA-strategy exam analyzing Robert Mondavi case written in 2001. It was a group exam and we had one day to work on. It was one of the rare occasions our study team sat together to answer. I like my study group a lot because we did not need to have face-to-face meeting a lot. We have gotten better and better at doing group assignments over email. I was satisfied with the results we submitted for CSCA.

We have ethics stream for the past two modules. Do not get me wrong. I am very interested in the subject. However, the classes were so boring and made me wonder why we have this subject at all. I think it is there just to please the potential employers: "look we teach ethics too". I wonder how students at other schools think about their coursework.

Now, we are busy with our BCAP (a year long consulting project with real companies). We are studying the enterprise software industry. Babson has access to very good online resources. I am getting familiar with a bunch of them. In Fall we do the industry analysis and in spring we focus on the sponsoring company and they problem they ask us to look at. We will know the sponsoring company next monday.

I will be attending Cyberposium organized by HBS this Saturday. We at Babson get more and more invitations from HBS and MIT events. More on that cyberposium next week.