During my study of game theory in business school, the professor gave an example of a game in which the equilibrium should produce independent, randomized choices by all players: penalty kicks in soccer. Strikers should kick the ball to a random location in the goal and goalies should dive in a random direction.
If you simplify the game, you could say that there are three locations in the goal—left, center, and right—and each player should choose them with equal probabilities of one third. However, while strikers do this, goalies don’t. Goalies are more likely to dive right or left than to stay put in the middle. Call it the negative consequences of having a bias to action, or think of it like playing rock-paper-scissors and always picking rock.
MBA Uncategorized football, game theory, goalies, Nash Equilibrium, penalty kicks, soccer
Here’s what I would do I had a second-rate application on my hands: market it as a niche product specifically for the education market, set a high price tag, hire some people with educational sales experience and sell the hell out of it. Most schools don’t like dealing with technology and love out of the box solutions that will suggest to students that they’re wired, they get it, they are educating in the 21st century, dammit! And they’ll pay a lot to make those statements, either by selling out their students to the branding of a product like Google Docs or by paying an insane amount of money for awful applications like Blackboard. Unless you’ve been a student or professor during the past few years, you’re probably not familiar with this software. Consider yourself lucky. However, somehow schools pay tens of thousands of dollar each to license it. Blackboard contains the functionality of a website circa 1998, but it’s scalable and doesn’t require schools or faculty to know much of anything about the web. IT managers should be fired for purchasing it.
MBA Uncategorized
From case studies I’ve read, both Southwest Airlines and Northwest Security Services will frown upon you with your MBA. Do you think the no-MBA hiring policy will become more widespread after the havoc that MBAs have wreaked on our economy? Do you know of other companies with such policies? PayPal used to have a no-former-consultants policy. Comment away!
MBA Uncategorized anti-mba, consulting, hiring, jobs, MBA
Group work is a staple of an MBA’s life. Conference rooms designated as “group study rooms” are often booked weeks in advance from 7 in the morning until 12 at night. The rules for qualifying as a “group” are posted in and outside of each room.
- You must arrive within 15 minutes of your meeting’s scheduled start time or else you forfeit the room.
- “Groups” consist of four or more people. Hey! Those guys only have three people in that room! Let’s kick them out! Swarm! Swarm! Swarm!
- Meetings will never end early.
Okay, so that last point isn’t really posted, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. And the reason it’s true is because groups are likely to debate meaningless points ad infinitum, as the Latin phrase goes. You would think that these people have nothing better to do than to discuss whether they need to include, in a case report about eBay, the fact that Beanie Baby sales were popular among the site’s early users. Yes or no. Mention it or don’t. I don’t care, but I do care that this is a waste of your time, which should be more valuable, and my time, which is more valuable. I like playing on teams well enough, but this is like playing on a basketball team where no one will shoot the ball. So, if you’re visiting a business school and in the part of the tour where they take you to the “group study room” area, just remember that the future MBAs in those soundproof rooms are not debating high strategy, global politics, economic theory, or even the best way to run a business. They’re arguing about Beanie Babies.
MBA Uncategorized beanie babies, ebay, group work
Someone at the University of Hawaii posted this Harvard Business paper online. It says “DO NOT COPY” all over it, but is still totally readable and will save you a valuable $6.95. Also, unlike the version you would buy from Harvard, this version doesn’t expire in six months. (Unfortunately, the “DO NOTE COPY” watermark doesn’t expire either.)
MBA Uncategorized business plans, Harvard, HBS
You could buy this case from the Harvard Business website for $6.95, or you could just download it here DRM-free from Stanford’s site.
MBA Uncategorized Case Studies, GSB, HBS, Stanford