Ken Richlin

It ain't over

My classes are done, but it ain't over till its over.  Or till the fat lady sings.  No, I still have some outstanding assignments left.  3 of them.  I'm pretty sure they're late, but it can't be helped.  The funny thing is, I could have been done by now, but I've been celebrating the end of school on and off for the past 3 weeks!

One of the assignments is a business plan, which I'm going to enter into the rutgers business plan competition once it's in some sort of state of readiness.  Here's the link to the competition: 5.1.1 - Figure 2 – Development Timeline  ooops wrong cut and paste...
http://www.bplan.rutgers.edu/

there it is.

I could have this thing finished by midnight, if I could stop coughing for more than twenty minutes at a time.

'Tis the season!

'Tis the season! Click onto my Amazon.com wish list and buy me a bunch of stuff I want!!!

Ken's Amazon.com Wish List!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/2IWBY8M4GV9Q8

Use whatever reasoning you want to justify the purchase.  Here's three reasons: It's Christmas, It's Hannukah, and I'm Graduating!!! 

Let's get moving people!  The economy isn't going to run itself!  It needs us to consume, so let's start doing our part by buying ME a bunch of stuff!!!

Team Building: Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned: Team Building

I've been learning quite a bit about teamwork and leadership in the past 11 weeks.  It seems like a lot of stuff from other class I am taking now or have taken in the past is coming together.  All the emotional intelligence from Executive Management class, the leadership and values lessons from the Nonprofit class... all of these things are closely related to teamwork.

I am sick to death of group work.  Every class here at Rutgers makes you do some of it.  And I've taken a lot of classes here.  It's become routine, and it was not until I took this class that I realized the distinction between group work and teamwork.  When I do group work, we sit down and divide up the assignment between ourselves, do our own work, and then put it all together, smooth over the rough parts and submit it.  We arrange to communicate and share resources if necessary, and make a plan to get it all together in the end, but aside from that the goal seems to be trending towards interacting with each other as little as possible. 

Why do we do this?  Well, everyone's swamped, and we just kind of want to get stuff out of the way... so we can move on to other stuff.  It's not that we don't like each other, it's just that being a student is a full-time balancing act, and group meetings are big blocks of time that nail us down to a single time and place.  We would rather have the freedom to move those blocks around our schedule, be flexible, work on our own time, and at our own pace.  For some of us, this means doing things on time.  For others, it means at the last minute, when they become urgent!  I think there may be something more there - a commentary about how fast-paced the business world has become, that you need to be a time management guru just to keep the barbarians from storming the gates on any given day...

The only times I've really worked on a team - this class nonwithstanding - were for Interfunctional consulting, and the supply chain case competition.  Oh, and orientation - we were definitely a team that time.

What made those times different?  Well, I it's because those three times the problems were really, really hard.  And they involved pulling together a lot of different skills and capabilities that, well, not all of us had!  All the other assignments here, I feel like that if the rest of my group got hit by a bus and were unable to contribute... I could have pulled it out and done the thing on my own.  But those three times - no way.  There was some skill, some outlook, some insight that I was missing, and usually I didn't even know it was missing until a teammate clued me in.

Having the opportunity to engage in team building has been an even better experience.  I thought hard about who to request for my "dream team".  A lot of the things we went over in class bounced around in my head.  I want to build my team so that we have a good cross-function of skills, different backgrounds and points of view.  That would give us a better chance of having the correct pool of capabilities we would need to solve whatever problem appeared on the horizon.  I thought a while in that direction, but then backed away from it.  The fact is, everyone in the class is good!  Good enough to solve whatever case study gets thrown at us.  What really mattered was fit - how well I would work with my team.  At the end of the day, I picked some people I'd worked with before - in this class, and in other classes.  I knew for a fact that we worked well together.  I liked them, communicated well with them, and I knew they were capable, dependable, hardworking and fair.

Seeing my team work together and reflecting on the process we used to choose them, I came to a strange realization.  The thought process I went through to select my dream team was probably the same process a college recruiter or HR person goes through when they make the decision to hire.  Think about it.  They have an MBA graduate.  They know this person is good.  The fact is, everyone in the class is good!  Or else they wouldn't even be graduating.  They've already proved themselves capable.  What matters now is fit - how well I work with their team.  Something to remember when I'm sitting across the interview table I guess!

A day in the life

So, there is another lull in the fighting, so I thought I'd tell you about my day last Thursday.

I woke up early at 7:15.  I had an interview in the morning!  But since it was a mock interview I decided to risk being late and slept until 8.  I am a bad man!

I arrived at the MEC building in Newark at 9:55 with ten minutes to spare!  The parking decks were full so I had to use one of the private ones.  I went into career services and did my mock interview with the new guy Dean.  He is very sharp... his questions were simple, but moderately challenging.  I did my best - tried to keep confident, energenic, intelligent, friendly.  All and all, I did well, but we talked for almost an hour about things I could have done a lot better.  Two questions I just nailed right to the wall, the regrets question and the stress question.  But I still have trouble with some of the behaviorial questions.

You didn't read my previous blog entry (because I never got around to writing it) but it was entitled "Interviews are my kryptonite"... I have mixed luck on interviews, I either do really well, or really bad.  I crashed and burned on the Avaya one.  Part of it has to do with overadjusting my style... when I screwed up the bank of new york interview, I changed my style to be more agressive.  Maybe too agressive!  I used to have a problem with nervousness, but Patrick helped me with that.  As for my other interviewing problems, well Dean helped me break them down into small, managable bites, so I think I've got it under control!

I went and hung out in the lounge until lunch time, when I walked down to the washington st. subway entrance where this great vegitarian restaurant opened up.  I'm in Newark every day, and it's always the same choices - pizza, thai food, deli, or burgers at McGoverns.  These are all wonderful choices, and there's nothing stopping me from going the extra (half) mile to the student center for fried chicken and quiznos, or to the chinese place... but after a while you sort of exhaust all the options and want something else.  So I had a killer veggie wrap and I drank something called an orange mango motion. 

Then I headed back to the lounge, thinking I could get some work done, maybe get around to finally fixing the broken website I made for the class, when I saw something going on in Bove auditorium.  It was prof Santoro's pharma ethics class, they had a guest speaker from the FDA speaking about the regulation of advertisements.  It looked interesting so I joined the class, and I was glad I did.  Ethics is a fascinating subject, sort of the open border between raw philosophy and the social norms of human cultures.  Since I wasn't even in the class and know a lot less than they do about pharmaceuticals, I figure I was the guy in that room who learned the most.  That means I win!!!

Then I went upstairs and got some work done.  I did a quick assignment for my nonprofit class and took care of some other tasks that were cluttering up my agenda.

At 5:40 I went to class.  My team always gets there early so we can have a quick project meeting, which we did.  We are examining the NJSBDC - the New Jersey Small Business Development Center - and the regional SBDC's underneath their umbrella.  We compared notes on our investigations and interviews, talked about the final paper and how we would start it.

In Nonprofit class the professor took our assignments, which were to ask 3 questions about Nonprofits, and he took some of the better questions and made the class answer them in a group discussion.  Great session.  My question was related to growth, and how the trade-off between growth and operations is made.  Cause if it was up to me, I'd say to hell with the mission today and just build up a huge endowment so my nonprofit could take over the world in 10 years!  But apparently that's not how it works... nobody will donate to your cause if you're not actively showing them how you're fulfilling your mission.  We also talked about climate change - political of course - and how that would effect nonprofits.  I went right to the heart of the matter and brought up the estate tax, which is now probably never going to go away, and we had a long discussion about whether the death tax is good or bad for nonprofits.  Obviously it's good.  It's an incentive to create new foundations.  Take away the incentive, you get less giving to nonprofits.  But prof. Abruzzo seemed to think that people would give regardless of the state providing incentives.  Well, everything I've ever learned as an armchair economist tells me otherwise.

After class I went home, and went out to college night at one of the clubs down the shore with some buddies.  My memory of this part is hazy but I believe I had a lot of fun!

Supply Chain Case Competition!

Last month I participated in the Supply Chain Case Competition here at Rutgers University. I worked like a crazy person through the last week of October on this thing, and let me tell you, it was an amazing experience, and blew away all my expectations. It set me a few days back in my classwork, but it was worth it. I'm proud of everything my team accomplished in our participation in this event.

Here is a picture of the RBS Team with the judges, the moderator and Prof. Lei! Standing to the right of me are Dinesh, Selim and Kevin.  Click to see it larger...

It all started when I got the e-mail from Mark (he's the president of the supply chain club) looking for people to be on the team. I worked with him last semester on the supply chain mini consulting project for AmeriSource Bergen, so he knew I would be up for anything supply-chain related.

I put my name into the hat, and to my surprise I was selected. I really thought that some others would beat me to it, particularly some of the more hungry first-year students. The team turned out to be me, Kevin, Dinesh and Selim. Kevin's a part-time MBA student studying Supply Chain here at RBS, and Dinesh and Selim are both PhD students. All sharp guys.

We met on Friday to do a study session ... to talk about what kind of analytical tools we should familiarize ourselves with, what the judges would be expecting, and what the other competing schools would be doing. Sandy Becker, a professor here at RBS, gave us a whole bunch of great of tips and advice... it was good advice, and if we had gone back over our notes from that session when we were busy crafting our presentation, it would have helped our standing a great deal.

Then Tuesday I hunted down Corinne and got my hands on the case. It turned out to be about implementing RFID at Metro. Not what I expected, but IT is one of my strong suits and I was pretty comfortable with the material. I went to sleep that night reading the case and thinking about what Metro should do... whether they should implement case-level tagging, or expand their current pallet-level tagging project.

We got together all day Wednesday and did the case together. It was just four guys on the Busch campus, two markers, one whiteboard and a whole lot of operations talk. More than any sane person should ever do in a single sitting. We spent all day hashing over the issues in the 25-page case. We talked about everything. Information systems, technology costs, rollout plans, distribution center strategy, inventory management strategies, policies for perishable goods, floor space, point-of-sale data, relationships with suppliers and customers, privacy issues, international standards for data exchange and its implications on RFID rollouts, distribution costs, micro-deliveries and milk runs, disco music (just seeing if you're still awake!), price negotiations with suppliers, the company's financial situation and a dozen other topics related to the problem at hand.

We broke for lunch then went back at it for a while. By this time we had a pretty good idea of what direction we were headed in. I gave Kevin a ride back to Newark where we both had class that evening.

Thursday we re-convened in Newark and picked up where we left off. We talked about a lot of stuff, and started crafting our recommendations and solutions for Metro. That afternoon, we performed a bunch of cost-benefit analyses for a host of possible scenarios. That took quite a long time, due to the many assumptions we had to make to compensate for incomplete information. We disagreed for a long time about whether to upgrade Metro from Gen1 tags to Gen2. I was dead against it for a while, but they won me over with some sound arguments. Hah, I was ready to drop the whole thing, but they made me keep discussing it until they were really 100% certain they had won me over. Just to keep team unity, and to show that they had a lot of respect for my opinions. Thanks guys :P

On Friday it was go-time. I put on my best threads and went to Livingston campus to participate in the competition. I was a bit nervous.. there were some great b-schools coming to Rutgers to compete. From out-of-state we were hosting Penn State, NYU and my own alma mater Lehigh. Some local schools also participated - Rutgers Engineering and NJIT.

The event was organized by the Center for Supply Chain Management at Rutgers, and held at the Rutgers Business School in New Brunswick. The judges were all senior supply chain executives for big Fortune 500 firms based in and around NJ! Like, wow. Each one of them at some point in the night stopped everything to take a phone call and politely tell the CEO’s or CFO’s of companies like AstraZeneca, AmeriSource Bergen, and Schering-Plough, that they were busy right now, and they’d call them back in an hour… just so they could spend this time on us. It amazes me that so many important people sacrificed half a day out of their incredibly busy schedules to help create this learning experience for all the teams. They showed us a great deal of respect, and we returned the sentiment very much in kind.

Dinesh, who stepped up to be our leader and spokesperson, went up to draw our position out of a hat. He picked 6. We would go last. This gave us a bunch of extra time to prepare and fine-tune our presentation. We used the time well, to run through the presentation several times and work on our poise, timing, flow and energy. This might have been the most valuable part of the experience for some of the group - I watched everyone in the team make big improvements, and I was no exception. Presenting is a skill, and I used this opportunity to practice it.

Since we went last, we missed the opportunity to see the other 5 schools present their solutions, and that's unfortunate... apparently the other groups looked at this problem through a very wide variety of lenses, the engineering schools in particular. The teams were all over the place in their analyses... but with so many different variables in play in this particular situation, this was really inevitable.

So, we went in there and presented. I opened, and did my best to fire up the group with my energy, and set the pace and tone for the rest of the presentation. That was my job. Dinesh had great confidence, and Kevin had great poise. Selim had the best command of some of the minutiae of the analysis. I discussed the current situation, the problem, and some of the key facts that would govern our analysis. I knew that Dinesh and Selim would do the best job in presenting the analytical issues and solutions; that really is their strong suit as PhD’s, so it was understood that they would take that part of the presentation. Kevin went into detail on some specifics on other opportunities to improve Metro that were not directly related to RFID - and really nailed it. We explored a lot of great options that no other team even thought of.

When the Q&A session came, I jumped in on a lot of the questions - mostly clarifications on some of the more unique ideas unrelated to RFID we had presented. I know I scored some big points talking about negotiating price leverage with suppliers and balancing the high ROI of case-level RFID tagging with the company's current financial status. I tried to prompt Dinesh to repeat some of the amazing things he said in our informal conversations, when a related question popped up… he’s really got a talent for articulating some of the more nuanced aspects of operations management, and I wanted him to showcase that talent… but he let the rest of us field a lot of the questions instead.

After our performance, all the teams adjourned to the staging area and Prof. Smouther hosted a quick feedback session with all the teams, letting us talk about our experience and how they could make it better next year.

The judges took the time to choose a winner. They took about forty minutes, so that is a compliment to all of the teams involved. It was a close race... we all did well, and each team had some big strengths. They brought us back in to announce the winners - it was Penn State. Then we got a cool plaque and our pictures taken, and finally we could adjourn to dinner!

Each team took the opportunity to network with the judges, professors, and other schools teams during dinner. Then a few judges were kind enough to take our team aside and give us a detailed critique of our performance.

From what they told us, we could have done some things better - organization of ideas, better flow of information from the conclusion to the supporting evidence and back to the conclusion... We solved the hell out of the problem, and had some really strong analysis, and we honed in on all the important factors.. we presented a complete, comprehensive solution, but we failed to build the most compelling case possible to support it. And we came up with a lot of good ideas for improvements unrelated to RFID. We had the data analysis down, but it wasn't organized and presented in the best possible way. This is what gave Penn State the win – they had it set up to go Bam, Bam, Bam… Solution, Reasoning, Solution. NYU got props for the best polish... I heard that their presentation was perfectly choreographed - certainly some polish could not have hurt our group!

It was an amazing experience. I learned so much. Seriously. I stayed there until like 7, soaking up knowledge, advice and wisdom from the judges. Also the food was excellent! Then I got out of there and celebrated my victory, because it was a victory. I had a great experience and learned more in three days then I usually do in two weeks. Would buy again.  Just another great experience I have Rutgers to thank for.

Some specifics lessons I learned… the dry operations stuff aside…

* Don't read the Slides! (Executives already know how to read) Talk about the subject material related to the slide, but let them absorb the information from the screen on their own. If this means pausing for 10 seconds while they read the thing, that's OK.

* Get to the point in the first slide! Time is valuable, especially if it's the CEO or board of directors you're talking to. They may just cut you off after 5 minutes, so that's why you need to put the answer up front. Maybe you'll have time to explain how you got that answer, but maybe you won't! Prepare for both scenarios.

* Don't waste the judges' time by repeating a bunch of facts they already know. We did this even though we knew it was wrong, just in case we presented first... stupid mistake.

* Bring it full circle. Finish right where you started. Give them a sense of closure, completeness, and thoroughness. Even if it is a huge complex problem like the one we had, find the strength within to ignore all that other stuff that isn't Important with a capital I. Leaders need to show confidence and certainty, while acknowledging that we live in an uncertain world.

* Don't read the Slides! (this is pretty important!)

* Back up everything you recommend with raw data, and outline the relationship between the two as clear as possible.

* Explore all the options, and quickly explain why you rejected them. Show them you did your due diligence.

* Something we did right - consider the financial position of the company. This is something that scored us big points, and surprisingly no other team did this. It doesn't matter if we recommend spending a bunch of money on something... if the company isn't in a financial position to follow through, it's a waste of time. Also, it's imperative you sell the CFO on whatever proposal you have, because you need their buy-in to make your project fly, or you just plain won’t get funding.

* Have the data ready to pull up in case they want to dig deeper. They probably will (though in this case, they didn't).

* Don’t read the slides! (This is really, really important!)

* It is OK to make assumptions if you have incomplete information. And get used to it, because in the real world you NEVER have complete information! Just document them, double-check them to make sure they are realistic, and be ready to explain them. Remember, you don’t need ALL the information, you just need ENOUGH to make a good decision.

 

Update

Today there is a lull in the fighting, so I am taking a few minutes to update you guys on my progress through the program. 

I did a foolish thing and volounteered to help represent RBS at the Supply Chain Case Competition next Friday.  Here's a link to the event.  This will eat up all of my time next week, and I'm going to spend the beginning of November playing catch up.  I ditched my workout today to come do some prepwork with the team.  I hope we win, because I've already spent the prize money...

Job search begins in earnest tomorrow, at the career fair.  I've put it off too long, and I graduate very soon.  Time to go see what the future holds for me.

Time management is a real key to making it through this program, and the whole "only night classes" thing is beginning to wear on me.  I've gotten into a bad habit of getting up too late and staying up too late.  So, tuesday night I stayed up all night so I would be good and tired when I went to bed wednesday, so I could finally get up in the morning again.  Lately all of my life seems to be blending together into one, single, long day.  I have to lift my head up every so often to figure out where I am and what I'm supposed to be doing here.  My calendar is pockmarked with responsibilities, projects, meetings, events, and it's only week 7.  The next 7 weeks are going to slip by so quickly, I know it.

What's the latest with my classes?  I'm glad you asked!

We're doing some interesting case studies in managing teams.  We just took our first test and I feel pretty good about my performance. 

In Entrepreneurship we are examining some local Mid-cap companies as our class project.  I chose Osteotech.  I'll let you know how it goes.  We did some good case studies in this class as well.

I walked into Small Business Finance two weeks ago into a horifyingly familiar setting.  You know it.  You enter the room and something's wrong.  It's too quiet.  Everyone's desk is cleared, except for writing utensils and a calculator.  WTF??  What do we need calucators for??  The exam, of course.  Yes, I was out sick with walking pneumonia the week before and missed the reminder.  I flew blind that night, but thankfully I knew the stuff, I got 32/40.  The average was apparently in the low 20's, so I call that a victory.  I am developing a business plan as my project... and giving serious consideration to trying to make it fly after I graduate.

Nonprofit Leadership class is turning out to be pretty good.  We have excellent discussions about some very important topics.  For this class we're talking about emotional intelligence, ground I've already covered in other classes, but a fascinating topic nonetheless.  The concept of leadership is always something I can learn more about.  I am really thinking about pursuing a career in nonprofits.  I think it would be rewarding in many ways.

Foundations of Entrepreneurship - Learning Summary #3

Learning Summary
Entrepreneurship Class
Week 3

Here are a few ideas that stuck with me

The entrepreneurial process flows from assumptions to analysis to conclusions to inferences.  Where many fail is at the very beginning – they make the wrong assumptions.  Or, assumptions that were once true are no longer so!  This is a risk of doing business in a world where technology and globalization are changing the way everyone does business.  How many giant companies have built empires just by challenging old assumptions.  Like “People have to go to stores to buy books”.  Not any more!  Remind me to send you the link to my amazon.com wishlist.

The trick is, to take a forward-looking view, to see what assumptions are going to be changed in the future.  It’s funny to watch old film strips from the 1950’s about “the home of the future” and laugh about the things they got wrong, and the things they got right.  But seriously, looking 1 year into the future is quite so hard as looking 50 years.  Entrepreneurs need to be near-term futurists.  To see future trends, and to be ready to hit them at their stride… not too late, and not too soon either.  It’s like surfing.  You need to hit the wave at precisely the right time to ride it.  Some ventures fail because they were just a little bit too early, or too late. 

There is always a tradeoff between harvesting company profits, or putting them back into growth.  The amount of money you plow back into the business may be a point of contention between investors.  Some may want to harvest their winnings ASAP.  Others might instead look towards re-investing as to realize greater rewards later down the line. 

This is the same dynamic that defines the classification between Growth and Value stocks.  Really, at least in terms of publicly traded stocks, they are both two sides of the same coin.  Value stocks shed dividends, which cause your portfolio to grow.  Growth stocks don’t issue much in terms of dividends – but they do grow in value in terms of their stock price, and the result is the same – your portfolio grows.  A wise investor can make either look like the other – by using dividends to purchase more value stocks, or selling off a few shares of growth stock to simulate an infusion of a dividend.  The only real difference is the strategy behind the management of the company.  As long as the management agrees on which course the company is following, there’s no issue.  But when the investors have a large portion of their capital committed to one venture, and they disagree with one another on the issue of growth vs. harvest… that’s a tough situation for anyone to be in.  It’s just a reminder that you need to think about the exit strategy from day 1, and make sure all the investors agree on it.

The difference between risk and exposure: A coffee brewer is 100% exposed to fluctuations in coffee prices… IF coffee beans represent 100% of their costs!  That means that they have total exposure.  Coffee beans only account for 5% of starbucks costs… so while fluctuations in prices are important to them, their exposure is greatly diminished.  (Besides, starbucks has negotiated dedicated contracts with many plantations – in essence locking down a lot of their supply chain with many, small, dedicated suppliers.  Their prices are similarly negotiated in advance, so most of the risk is transferred to the farmers themselves.  Just another way to reduce exposure, really)