The Divine Miss N

How fascinating!

[paragraph one, in which yours truly dances in from the left, Martha Reeves singing 'Nowhere to Run' at the top of her lungs from the laptop speakers.]

Happy belated Thanksgiving! I can't believe it's a year ago since I walked along in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade with two friends, and we were this close to freezing our butts off. Excuse my French. Good memories.   

As I was going through some of the archives to see what I was doing last year and two years ago, I ran across this from a vintage post in November 2005:

" Before I came to b-school, people would comment that I was good at thinking outside the box, and my reply was always that I was good at it because I had no idea what the box looked like, or where it was, let alone if I was thinking in- or outside of the box. Now they're teaching me what the box is (ha, and not just what it looks like, but who built it, how they financed it, what the box-strategy was, how the team worked that built it and why there is a demand for boxes in the first place), and I'm worried that I won't be able to think outside it again."

I realised reading it how much I learnt, then and since... I can now value the box using different methods, see how you can innovate inside and outside the box, how you start up new boxes, what the businessplan looks like for the boxes, what the competition for the boxes might be, if you want to start up some new boxes where to get the finance from, how to lead the box-team, and who to call if I ever wanted to trade box-derivatives. Damn. I know all this stuff. And as far as thinking outside the box goes, I don't seem to have lost that knack completely. I think. Show me the boxes!

[end blogpost, at which yours truly leaves the stage to the right, humming along to the Mad Lads. I'm trying out Last.fm and really liking it.]

Sound advice

Hat-tip to my housemate M who pointed me towards this poem below, Rudyard Kipling does an excellent job in setting out what's important in life I think. Thought I'd share, perhaps it will mean as much to some of you as it does to me.
Anand, I'm still thinking about your question, yes I have something to say about it, but haven't been able to pour it into anything coherent yet. For now, Kipling says it best.

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

Rudyard Kipling

On the necessity of unproductive gaps in your day

It's been a while. I know. If you've been waiting (I know mum has but am not quite sure if anyone else is), my apologies. For reasons that are quite unclear to me, I haven't felt that I've had a lot to write about lately. It's not that I've a quiet life recently. Lots of stuff has been happening, all good. I've been to concerts (Harry Connick Jr. and the Missa Solemnis were particularly good), seen DVD's* (the Matrix. Yes, gasp, I'd never seen it before), had drinks with tons of people, went to lectures, had many dinners at Wagamama's and other assorted restaurants, flew back to NL for some TLC, read books, thought a lot about what was in those books, worked. But does anyone really care, or want to read about it? Do you? I suspect maybe not. I suspect that most people still come here wanting to read about what an MBA from LBS is like. And I have preciously little to say about it right now. Well, that's not quite true, I do have something to say (with the upcoming interviews in mind in particular), but haven't sat down long enough to collect my thoughts. Which I really want to do. Perhaps later on this week. If can sit down long enough.

Saw the above ad in the tube yesterday and I can't imagine anything worse. What would happen if someone took all the unproductive gaps out of my day? I wouldn't chat to my colleagues of a cuppa, listen to music on my way into work, write, read, dawdle, daydream, think. Why are we so obsessed with doing instead of taking time out now and then for being? How on earth do people develop thoughts, or daydream without unproductive gaps? Why this obsession about productivity (as my American friends are wont to pontificate about: US productivity is so much higher than in Europe. Well, congratulations. Well done. I'd rather have a life.)? Hoorah for unproductive gaps in the day! We need more of them!! Say no to ruthless efficiency!!

* I'm the Western Hemisphere's worst movie-goer. I've never seen ET, or any Star Wars movie, or any of the Harry Potter ones. Or Gone With The Wind. Or Jaws. Any move that came out in the last, oh, say 7 years or so? Chances are 99 to 1 that I haven't seen it. I do like movies. Really. But it's just not part of my culture DNA. My favourite movie of all times? Cry Baby, a John Waters cult classic.

Fringe benefits

Sometimes the big things in life come with unexpected smaller side-effects. Take my job, located in between Southwark and London Bridge. It's a great location, close to the river, but most of all, close to Borough Market which is an unintended, but very welcome side effect. Every Friday I roam the market at lunchtime (or preferably slightly later when it's less busy). I know there's a lot that true-blue foodies can say about Borough Market (it's expensive, it's snobbish at times, overcrowded with tourists at times), but I still love it passionately. I love the sights and sounds, the wonderful products (Polish sausages, chocolate and real truffles, more butter you can swing a stick at, meat (it's the rabbit season at the mo'), scallops, tomatoes, garlic, jams, and of course my usual lunch: German Bratwurst (with curry gewurz ketchup in my case, reminds me of home), and a ton more foodie-goodies I'm forgetting to mention. Reading a book this morning (Lewis Hyde's The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World) where the author talks about the gift economy reminded me of another reason why I love the market: because every purchase is a little bit of a gift. It's much more human buying something off a vendor of the market than in the anonymous supermarket. You chat, you talk about the produce, you banter, and occasionally you haggle. Try that at Tesco. Buying something off the market feels like a gift, not a chore. It's something you want to do, rarely something you need to do. Which as soon as I wrote it down made me feel snobbish. I give up, no more excuses or explanations. I just love the place.

Another book which was delivered by my friendly Amazon delivery guy was A Technique for Producing Ideas, which yielded some useful advice for people working in advertising, which I think has a relevance far beyond advertising too:
'This then is the whole process or method by which ideas are produced:
First, the gathering of raw materials -- both the materials of your immediate problem and he materials which come from a constant enrichment of your store of general knowledge.
Second, the working over of these materials in your mind.
Third, the incubating stage, where you let something beside the conscious mind do the work of synthesis.
Fourth, the actual birth of the Idea -- the 'Eureka! I have it!' stage.
And fifth, the final shaping and development of the idea to practical usefulness.
...
The principle of constantly expanding your experience, both personally and vicariously, does matter tremendously in any idea-producing job.'

[note: the above image is of my friendly Bratwurst guy, but not at Borough, he's at the Covent Garden Night Market which was held in August.]

What's on my mind

... what the Fonz was doing in our office building this week. And why did the Innocent guys talk about him on their blog at the same time. Is there a Fonz revival? If there's not, there should be one. Let's hear it for the Fonz!!!

... why marketers insist on making products targeted at women pink? Don't get me wrong, I love pink, but not for everything. I've had this bottled up inside for a while, ever since I read this in the Guardian.

... why life is so chaotic and confusing at times. I suppose because it's life.

... why I didn't come up with the idea for Facebook.

... on the Facebook note, would it be better for a company/charity to have a profile on Facebook, or a group? I think my preference now goes out to a profile. Makes it easier to follow what they do, since it'll show up on the feeds on my Facebook homepage. I still haven't figured out how (if) to get the changes on my groups on my RSS feeds.

... how I like the new Wolff Olins site, which looks like they're walking their talk (and here). Let's hear it for interactivity.

... how there are very little cool museumshops online. And how little most museums do with digital. There's a huge opportunity here!

... how cool this new project (the World Beach Project) at the V&A is.

... how interesting it is that Ebay is copying Kiva's idea at their new website Microplace (hat-tip to Marketingfacts, who point to this article in Businessweek).

... how I can't help but think British Airways is a neat airline (I know, people will send me a barrage of emails about how their suitcases always get lost, how they don't like the air hostess' uniforms, and how crap the food is. I don't care. I love how they serve my tea with milk and a smile.), have a peek at this. [and yes, to avoid a conflict of interest, I have booked return flights to NL with BA in a few week's time]

... where should I go on holiday? Before the loan repayments kick in, I'll have a little bit of cash to splurge on a holiday. Dallas (home of mr and mrs M)? Canada? Japan? Transmongolia Express? Interrail? I can't decide.

[edit to add this: my housemate spotted a cool blog: LadyGeek, which talks about pinking up is dumbing down.]

Music courtship

I bought a new pair of headphones (actually, to be somewhat technically anal about it which I gather is de rigeur in headphone cycles: in-ear phones) the other week, which meant that my iPod is going through somewhat of a Renaissance. Now I can actually listen to my music on the Tube; with the standard-issue headphones I couldn't turn up the sound loud enough to hear anything and not get a million angry looks my way for being a tad too social with my somewhat eclectic musical taste which not everyone seems to appreciate. I'm rediscovering the music on it again, listening to more podcasts than ever and enjoying it lots. How could I have forgotten about the genius of The Black Crowes? Or Aretha Franklin? And Geert Mak has me glued to my earphones with his rendering of his book In Europe.

This new listening-revival made me think back to other times when I was heavily into listening to music, which more often than not coincided with being in a love with a guy. Inevitably, the guy would make tapes (and later on CD's), which would be slipped into my hands with short notes confessing endless undying love. I discovered Pink Floyd this way, have good memories of Lenny Kravitz, discovered a love of Lynnyrd Skynnyrd that endures to this day. That lead me to wonder, what do youngsters nowadays do in terms of musical wooing? Burn CD's? Buy each other songs on iTunes? Make a personalized Myspace page? Make a playlist on Last.fm or Pandora? Anyone have any idea how the musical wooing / courtship takes place in 2007?

I admire

Whilst I'm good at a great number of things (sniffing out good bargains at H&M, buying terribly good chocolate and finding any bookstore or library in a 200m radius of wherever I am with my eyes closed come to mind) I'm also pretty darn good at admiration. I admire the girl sitting next to me on the Tube this morning for her imaginative outfit (think Beth Ditto meets The Puppini Sisters with dashes of bright red and patent leather in all the right places). I admire the gentleman behind me at the Tube station this morning for elbowing his way into the final seat just before I could get to it (where on earth have good manners gone?). Of course I adore and admire various celebrities, although I don't read Hello magazine or the Daily Mail frequently enough just quite who's in vogue to admire right now so my admirations might be a bit stale  (is Posh still around?). And I do admire mothers with toddlers, even if only for the sheer amount of stuff they must remember to bring every time they leave the house, making it akin to hiking up the Mont Blanc in my eyes. And of course there are plenty of people that I'm forgetting to mention right now who are eminently admirable.

Most of all however, I admire (envy?) columnists. There is something about being able to write a relatively short, pungent and topical comment on an at first glance ephemeral subject which on second reading (does anyone ever read a column twice? Or is that just me?) reveals more about the state of our society than its initial contents led you to believe. Snapshots of current culture. Taking the pulse of a society. Slapping it in the face to wake it up to then hold up a mirror to show it its weaknesses and hilarities. My favorite of all columnists is Mrs Moneypenny (is it a coincedence that she too is an LBS MBA? :-) The only reason I subscribed to the FT whilst in b-school was to read her column in the Weekend Supplement. I have been known to walk over to LBS specifically to pick up the paper so I could read it (yes, I take both my reading and my admiration very seriously). Now that my presence no longer graces the LBS grounds I have reverted to reading them online, where they have a nice back catalog as well. Witty and irreverent, she's the aunt or mentor you never had but wish you did. She's the voice in your head you would have if you had a witty sense of humour.

[image: London last week on my lunch break, in what is one of my favorite views: St Paul's.]

A little envy is a good thing

Yesterday, the blog (well, actually the other one) paid off dividends in a most unusual way: one of my housemates of 9 years ago whom I'd sadly lost touch with found me and we met up. It was as if we'd only just saw each other last week and we had a fab time catching up and then philosophizing about life (*waves at mr W*).

*Warning, the rest of this post comes with a minor mental health warning.* One of the things we were talking about was jobs/careers and how to figure out what you want to do and then figure out how to get there. On the way home I suddenly remembered a conversation (it must have been during CPM, if anyone reading this recognizes the gist of it, please drop me a line, I'd like to know where I stole this idea from) about envy. I think a little envy is a good compass in figuring out where you want to go. Think of who you're envious off and why. What about them makes you think 'darnit, I wish I had that job!'? What friend makes you green with envy because they seem to be having a blast/ton of money/good life/a constant smile on their face/handsome (or pretty, depending on your persuasion) partner/job that makes you literally green with envy? And how did they get what they have that you want? And then, and that's the most important thing: draw a lesson, learn from it, see how you can apply it in your life and move on. Don't get stuck in envy. Little bursts of envy are good, wallowing in it will make you unhappy beyond belief.

I remember that some people felt really uncomfortable about feeling envious, since it's labeled as a 'bad' feeling. Envy = bad. I see their point, but think that it is a human emotion and it doesn't make sense labeling it either good or bad. If you sense it, might as well do something with it and use it to your advantage. A little envy is not a bad thing.

After this train of thought I suddenly realised that if the current me talked to me 3 years ago, I would have been green with envy for my current life. I have a wonderful set of family and friends, a job I love, live in what is one of the best cities on earth to live in, in a nice flat in a nice neighbourhood, and I'm healthy and happy. Somewhere along the line I followed my envy and did something right ;-)

[edit: luckily my classmates have a better memory than me (see the comments), it was Alain de Botton who more eloquently made this point and from whom I stole it. And Fran, I do mean outright envy. Green in the face, damn-why-don't-I-have-that envy. Ambition is what happens after envy I think.]

So if this is 30

... I'm liking it a lot! I had a wonderful birthday, both in NL with my family and in LON with my friends. I was so touched by the kind gifts and flowers (thanks for the flowers, mr P, they are lovely!) and emails, texts, comments on the blog, voicemails and cards , I felt like a queen. I can highly recommend turning 30 to anyone! And as all 30 somethings have been telling me, 30 is the new 20. Although I must admit that I'm much happier now than I was at 20, give me 30 anyday!

I've been thinking a bit about what the right questions are to ask. I'll explain. I still get a bunch of emails from prospective applicants asking me all sorts of questions. I'm happy to oblige and answer to the best of my ability. However, after another one of these emails, I shook my head and said to my housemate, 'the answers to these questions will not make the decision to pursue an MBA in general, and at LBS in particular, any easier. All I'll do is satisfy a craving for what will turn out to be largely useless information. These are the wrong questions!'. Upon  which my very wise housemate asked 'alright, if you know so well, then what are the right questions to ask?'. Ouch. She had me there. I don't know. And although I've spent a few days thinking about them, I still don't quite know. But I have come up with an analogy which might help a little.

See, it's a little like buying a house/flat/piece of real estate. You ask what you think is important from the outside looking in. Some of these questions will be the right ones. Some of them won't be. But you won't know which questions fall into which category, until you experience it. And even then it might be hard to figure out what clinched the deal for you. If I think back on the property I bought way back when (my lovely 2 bed flat), I bought it after seeing it for 20 minutes, and having spent less than a day in that neighbourhood. It could've gone horribly wrong. But it didn't. Did I ask all the right questions? Nope. Did I ask some stupid, inane questions that didn't even matter to me once I settled in? Yep. And that's what it's like when you're thinking about an MBA. I thought I was going to be active in the Women in Business club and asked questions about it, turns out that didn't turn me on one bit and I wasn't involved at all. However, if you asked me 3 years ago I would've said that mattered to me. I thought I wanted to go on an exchange and it turns out I did and I'm very happy with that choice. I had no idea I'd be involved with the Marketing Club or the Yearbook. I had an inkling I wanted to be a student ambassador. The catch 22 is that you won't know what will matter to you, what will clinch the MBA deal for you until you do it. By which time obviously it's too late to ask questions.

I've asked a bunch of people what types of things clinched the deal for an MBA/ an MBA at LBS for them and it's rarely any of the things that any applicants asks me. It's never about lecture methods, or scholarships or workload. It's about atmosphere, great electives, your classmates, what you bring to the table, what opportunities you can create.

Alright, so I might need to develop this train of thought a bit more. Does it make any sense to anyone, this analogy?

Image top left: the box of the champagne for my 30th birthday.

New Year's Eve (well, almost)

Tomorrow is my own personal New Year's Eve. Complete with champagne and new year's resolutions. No, I'm not either celebrating the Jewish New Year (but if you do: happy new year!) or screwing up on my calendar-reading-skills, tomorrow marks the last day as a twentysomething. From Saturday onwards I'll be checking the 30-35 category on surveys. And I wouldn't be me (grammar?) if that didn't call for a spot of celebration. I flew out to NL yesterday to spend a few days with my family, have a big birthday brekkie on Saturday morning and then fly back to LON to have a shindig over there. I do *love* a good celebration!

One of the coolest profs at LBS is professor Lynda Gratton, who's just got a new book called Hot Spots out a few months ago, and has some very good advice here on video (with sound). I wholly agree with her idea of going out of your way to meeting new people, going to new places and putting yourself into new situations helps you become not only more creative, but also a better leader. And I think just a more interesting person in general. And you have more fun. You get my drift.

As a final note on this post, I saw this on Flickr the other day and couldn't resist sharing.

[edit: photo taken at Last Night of the Proms in the Park last Saturday. And I promise I'll go over the comments, I read all of them, but haven't gotten round to saying something in return. But soon I will. After I hit my 30s.]