The annoying thing about blogs is that they can’t really die.  They’re like anthrax spores; they linger around for years, dormant and insidious.  Where’s the closure?

There is no closure, so I suppose I may as well start writing again.

And a big hello to my friends at Wharton.  It’s probably not entirely coincidental that my interest in this web site has flagged just as my classmates’ awareness of it has mushroomed.  Painful self-consciousness, oddly enough, is just the worst thing for navel-gazing.  When I think about some of my recent posts (e.g., weepy stories about dead dogs, rehashing of application essays, etc.), I literally cringe.

The fact that so many of my classmates seem to have independently discovered this site (and let me be completely straight up about this: I’m only talking about a handful of people) is a bit mystifying.  Based on my monthly hit rate, the odds of accidentally chancing across adamstein.org would seem to hover somewhere below infitesimal.  But discover it they have.

To my further surprise, traffic has remained strong throughout the two-month hiatus, and possibly even climbed a bit.  Is this a good thing?  I used to flatter myself that people stopped by to read the things I wrote.  That was before I got wise to the statistic-mangling behavior of all those newsreader programs automatically peeking at my home page every day to check for updates.

Some of the traffic is legit, however, particularly the wanderers sent here by Google’s image search engine.  Bizarrely, the most popular page on this entire site is a picture of a heap of dead bunnies (warning: mildly grim, although technically speaking it is just a photo of a deli counter).  The search term sending people to that page is “rabbits”, not “dead rabbits” or “skinless rabbits”, or “pile of flayed bunnies”.  So far no one has complained.

The geographic distribution of traffic continues to be an endless source of fascination.  Someday I’ll have to put together some graphs to get a better look at the patterns, although the factors driving the changes will likely remain forever mysterious.  Why the sudden popularity in Israel?  Why so fickle, Argentina?  Don’t you have anything better to do, Belgium?  The tail end of the distribution is even more interesting than the fat end.  This month has seen single visitors from Tuvalu, Kyrgyzstan, Iceland, and Trinidad, to name but a few.  Whatever drew these solitary travelers here, it wasn’t enough to entice them back. 

To all of these visitors, both faithful and fickle, I want to say: can I crash at your place sometime?

I’m reluctant to predict a return to a semi-regular post schedule.  I’ve been tempted to make such an announcement several times over the past two months, and in each case I would have been wrong.  But I do have a vague sense that the ice might be breaking.  The sap is beginning to move. 

After all, how can I resist this chance to pander to my new growth markets?  Coming soon: “Canada: Our Plucky Neighbor to the North”; “Israel: Spicy Little Desert Garbanzo”; “Belgium: The Phoenix Rises”…

It’s a valid question: what the hell do we actually learn in business school?  Business isn’t a distinct skill or a body of knowledge.  Isn’t success in business usually due to some combination of experience, common sense, savvy, and force of personality, with maybe a little luck thrown into the mix?

Here are the classes I’ve taken so far: accounting, finance, economics, statistics, strategy, marketing, general management, ethics, and operations management.  These aren’t so much classes as broad topics, and I’ll be getting into the specifics of individual courses in future posts.  For now I’ll just offer some general observations.  I may as well let you know up front that this is a groundwork post, and it’s not really going anywhere. 

Business school classes rely heavily on case-based discussion.  The professor assigns a professionally researched case analysis of (usually) a real-life business situation, and the class dissects the case in the context of whatever topic we happen to be studying.  Ostensibly, the rationale for case-based learning is that real business decisions have to be made under the messy circumstances of the real world, which include conflicting objectives, limited resources, and incomplete information.  A cynic might suggest that the reason we study cases is that nothing we are taught in business school is worth putting in an actual textbook.

So, for example, in my operations management class, we discussed the cranberry case — which my professor actually refers to as the “famous cranberry case” — to better understand how to handle heavy seasonal variations in demand.  In my ethics class, we discussed the case of Merck, which had to balance shareholder interests against humanitarian goals when deciding whether to develop a treatment for African river blindness.

Because cases attempt to dramatize a strategic decision point, they have an annoying tendency to abuse a rhetorical device that you might call “Enter the Mind of the Executive.” About 30% of business cases start like this:

Clunky writing aside, cases can be pretty fun, especially when they bleed over into history or sociology.  America’s is a commercial culture, and cases often touch on topics that are compellingly familiar from everyday life.  Did you know that Coca Cola’s dominance in Europe is largely a result of Eisenhower’s decision to set up bottling operations in the areas controlled by Allied troops in World War II?  Did you know that in the ’70s, Levi’s made a strategically disastrous decision to extend their brand into formal men’s wear, including three-piece suits?  Beyond factoids, cases often tell the story of how companies that we all know, love, or love to loathe became the companies they are today.

Another miscellaneous fact about business school cases: they are almost all written by professors at Harvard Business School (HBS).  The ubiquity of the Harvard seal in our reading material annoys a small handful of Wharton students, but most of us couldn’t be bothered to care.  A few of our cases have come out of Wharton, Stanford, the London School of Economics, etc., and the simple fact is that the HBS ones are better.  Their superiority doesn’t arise from any magical Harvard talent that, say, the faculty at Kellogg or Chicago lacks; rather Harvard simply places a much greater emphasis on producing high-quality cases.

Coming soon: the results of the HP case competition.

I had hoped my winter break would be business school fabulous.  They’ve given me three weeks to play with.  Three whole weeks. Do you know what I could do in three weeks?  I could sail to Antarctica.  I could ride a dog sled across Alaska.  I could bicycle from the table-top mountains of Venezuala down to the tropical coast.  I could raft the Zambezi.

Alas, the gods of leisure have punished me for my hubris.  I will spend the first two weeks of break kicking around the east coast before joining 200 close friends for a ski trip in Vail.  Vail is sort of fabulous (and fabulously cheap, thanks to my shameless willingness to free-ride on my friends’ condo reservation).  But it isn’t enough to cure me of the lingering sense that I am squandering my vacation.

I did have an alternative destination in mind for the first half of my break.  Due to some quirks of American electoral politics and the fervent wishes of certain devoted interest groups, I am not actually allowed to visit the destination I had in mind.  Prudence dictates that I not publicly reveal the name of this destination, but I don’t see any harm in offering a few hints.  Think of our happy socialist friends down south.  Think of baseball and state-subsidized ice cream.  Think of scruffy beards and la revolucion siempre.  Think hand-rolled cigars, premium rum, and missile crises.  Entiende?

That’s right, I had planned to visit “Denmark.” But I ran into trouble arranging the trip.  For some reason I assumed that the Danish travel embargo was just a big (wink, wink) joke, that you could call up any travel agent and say, “Yeah, I’m really interested in spending two weeks in Canada and/or Mexico this winter, and if you could maybe put me on a plane that happens to continue on to Copenhagen, that would be just splendid.”

It doesn’t work like that.  Instead it works like this (conversation transcribed from fuzzy memory, but roughly accurate):

Me: Hi!  I’d like to go to Denmark!
Agent: OK.  Do you have a travel permit?
M: Ha ha, that’s rich.  “I could have sworn I had it right here, officer.  It must be in my other pants.”
A: Excuse me?
M: No, no travel permit.
A: Do you have any relatives in Denmark?
M: How should I know?
A: What is the purpose of your trip?
M: Er, there is no “purpose,” per se.  Do I need a purpose?  I’m on vacation.  You know.  Palm trees.  Salsa music.  Denmark.
A: Is there anything else I can help you with?

So here I am in New York.  Another round of happy reunions with my friends’ sofas.  Then on to Boston to be spoiled rotten by my mother’s fridge.  The Carpathian mountains will have to wait.

For no obvious reason, my professor for MGMT 654 — Managing People at Work — requires groups of students to devise and perform skits in every class.  The skits are meant to dramatize some workplace issue for class discussion, and we business school students approach these assignments with the same gusto that we reserve for anything that provides distraction from our soul-crushing accounting homework.

You can imagine how hideously bad many of these skits are.  You don’t need me to tell you that it is just an eye-gougingly painful thing to have to watch a group of MBAs hammily enacting an assembly line in Toyota’s widely admired NUMMI production facility; or Nordstrom’s salesforce incentive system; or Cisco’s corporate acquisition process.  But I’m going to anyway.

The early skits relied heavily on obvious and cruel jokes about the foibles of our classmates and professors.  These jokes were very cheap and frequently funny.  Soon that well ran dry, and the skits devolved into a series of increasingly bizarre burlesques, usually involving cross-dressing, heavy abuse of the the classroom’s fancy multimedia capabilities, and crude sexual puns.  For example, recently I watched five of my classmates perform an ’80s-style rap about defunct low-cost airline PeoplExpress, after which Jagadish writhed his way through a surprisingly skillful stiptease to the tune of “I’m Too Sexy.” These inexplicable displays are sometimes funny, particularly in an isn’t-it-funny-I’m-paying-$120,000-for-this kind of way.

My team’s skit was a few weeks ago.  The professor asked us to dramatize the corporate culture of the Mary Kay cosmetics company, which is pretty much a lay-up of an assignment.  Concocting a rap about airline deregulation is much harder than wringing laughs out of a salesforce of 30,000 bleached blonde “beauty consultants” who compete for prizes of pink Cadillacs and display a disturbing propensity to see the handiwork of Jesus in their climbing sales figures. 

Of course we dressed up in drag.  Mark Kay almost exclusively employs women, so really we didn’t have any choice in the matter.  Also, cross-dressing is the second cheapest form of laugh-getting, right after cruel mockery of peers.

My performance in the skit has been much remarked upon for reasons that weren’t part of my original design.  I don’t want to belabor this part of the story.  Let’s just say that I didn’t get my hands on the borrowed dress until about an hour before class started.  Let’s also say that the first time I tried the dress on was thirty seconds before the curtain went up.  Let’s further acknowledge that the dress was tight in all the wrong places.  Let us finally admit that my new nickname at Wharton is “lunchpack.”

My friend Jeff raced over after class to inform me that I “needed a bigger handbag.” He was referring to the handbag that I awkwardly clutched in front of my crotch for the duration of the performance.  I have received several comments on my, um, display, but Jeff’s is the one that fills me with the most dread.  As editor of class newsletter, Jeff delights in plucking the humiliating moments from the quotidian, stashing them away in his secret evil database, and revisiting them in lurid detail months after the fact.

I have attempted to impose a unilateral ban on lunchpack references in the upcoming newsletter, but I’m dealing from a weak hand.  Jeff refuses to accept a post facto lunchpack ban, insisting that any lunchpack embargo apply on a going-forward basis only.  I insist that I would really just greatly prefer not to read about my lunckpack in a publication distributed widely among my peers.  Jeff irrelevantly points out that no one forced me to put on the lunchpack-revealing dress.

So we’ve reached an impasse.  The lunchpack remains on the table.  When the newsletter does finally come out, just remember, you read it here first.