More thoughts

Lesson 25: If you structure the incentives right, people will pursue their personal motivations to the benefit of the overall firm.
Lesson 26: Loading more costs into your inventory can affect any future writedowns, which affects expenses shown in a given year.
Lesson 27: Depreciation schedule changes are often triggered to improve financial statement appearances, but there may be latent economic justifications for doing so.
Lesson 28: Productivity, flexibility, quality: pick two (in some operational situations).
Lesson 29: A single decision upfront may make it impossible to succeed, no matter how sound your decision-making downstream.

Masters class

Last night our learning team had dinner with a new professor who will be teaching first year students in the second semester. He came from the banking world and joined academia relatively late, so he's not from a typical background. HBS uses practitioners, often very senior people from the business world, to teach a few of the entry-level classes. To get this kind of interaction (and these are case discussions, not lectures, so there is real back-and-forth on a daily basis) with them during their normal working lives would have been pretty unusual, but it's interesting that they choose to teach when they could truly be doing anything they wanted, or nothing at all.

Another batch

Lesson 17: The buyer isn't always the one with the money.
Lesson 18: Sometime there's a tradeoff between having high machine utilization and maintaining low work-in-process inventories.
Lesson 19: It's fine to let your accounts receivable terms get extended, as long as your accounts payable are stretched out longer.
Lesson 20: A new product solution can retroactively redefine something that was acceptable as a problem.
Lesson 21: Strong growth rates can cause bankruptcy, even in profitable businesses with continuously positive net income.
Lesson 22: Watch deferred income carefully, because companies can use it to mask a lot of things or obscure their current profitability.
Lesson 23: Brand value may not be tied to any measurable product attribute, but they can still make people very price insensitive.
Lesson 24: Pooling can shorten throughput times but makes information flow messier.

Gobble

There's a turkey on campus. She (I assume this based on its size, but I'm no expert) can often be found wandering quite placidly around campus. I encountered her on my first or second day here, standing outside the doors of Burden Auditorium. She looked like she was waiting for a presentation to start. Come Thanksgiving I bet she makes herself scarce.

More lessons

Lesson 13: Accounting can't really capture economic reality.
Lesson 14: In many cases good or proper accounting procedures are defined retroactively.
Lesson 15: Adequately evaluating labor productivity requires one to disentangle it from capital productivity, which can be extremely difficult.
Lesson 16: Sometimes eliminating a clearly bad thing can lead to a worse thing, at least in the short term.

Rational exuberance

The first full week of classes has come to a close, with a ludic and ludicrous Skydeck presented by the members of Old F. Replete with the requisite Facebook incriminations, prank calls, and a bizarre yet convincing ersatz Career Services presentation, the section was alternately in hysterics, utter confusion, and consternation. The level of effort and genuine community feeling brought the class to its feet yet again, for standing ovation number two in as many days (and applause number 17 or so for Friday).

Ovations

The norm with which a new HBS student most quickly becomes familiar is probably that of applause. We clap. A lot. At the beginning of class, when a visitor is introduced, at the end of every class, at key moments in class, when someone makes a joke or an unintentional joke or (less often) a particularly pithy or profound or virtuoso comment - the HBS experience is continually punctuated by clapping. Each section builds its own community identity - and expresses it often - through this most communal of actions.

Lessons, continued

Lesson 9: When pricing, keep in mind that the inherent tension between market share and profitability affects the viability of a new product or business, and these effects are unpredictable in the long-term.
Lesson 10: Brands can be highly irrational, or rational on irrational bases.
Lesson 11: You have to always first understand and then manage others' perceptions of you.
Lesson 12: Just because a particular process runs well or is profitable, it may not be helping the organization overall.

Lessons learned...

... in a nutshell:

1. Don't seek out short-term solutions if the problems are long-term.
2. Don't let those who are indifferent or destructive linger in hopes that they will eventually come around.
3. You really have to trust the auditors, but ultimately no one has the complete picture.
4. Controlling the customer experience can be extremely profitable.
5. Don't wait to provide bad news.
6. Lots of important things (e.g., cost structures) can be obscured in financial statements.
7. There are lags in how market perception translates to sales.
8. The efficient frontier for complex production can vary significantly by lot size.

Showtime

Friday marked the start of our first official classes with a three-case day. Each session is one of the fastest 80 minute time periods of my life. In these first few days everyone tries to get a word in edgewise, which leads to a prolific show of hands at almost all times. I understand that this will calm down shortly, which will let the section settle into a comfortable dynamic.

Case two

Our second case discussion was most remarkable for the amount of preparation put in by a professor who was teaching most of us for the first and last time. The vast majority of us will never take a class with him again, and the rest will probably not see him until the second term of our second year. Despite this he commenced by addressing several classmates while deftly weaving in some tidbit about their education, experience, nationality. This went on, as various comments were used as springboards to riff on some element of a student's background unknown to anyone else.

It was a virtuoso display that could have easily been dismissed as a neat parlor trick in the first few minutes, though by the second hour of our give-and-take, it became clear that his research involved more than a few of us.

I don't know if they trot out the stars for just the first few days of the term to dazzle us. If not, we're in for a very interesting year.

First case

On Wednesday morning we met in our sections for the first time to review our first case. Our professor opened with a gentle cold call and skilfully wove a number of threads through the ensuing conversation. At the very end he reflected a bit on his own experience as an MBA student, pointing out the very seat which he himself occupied as a new HBS student, the seat whose current occupant was the lucky recipient of the very first cold call of Section F, Class of 2009.

Day one

The first day was fairly filled with activities, and in a good way. The introductory speeches this morning were substantive, and the speakers came across as people who had done this many times before. That's one of the things that is most striking about HBS: the entire campus exudes an aura of competence and solidity, with a fair dose of privilege and its attendant lavishness. The grounds are immaculate and the campus proves to be a surprisingly rural idyll not far from the heart of Boston. When you have this much money you can buy the best, and Harvard has. There is a tiny fraction of people in the world who have received post-secondary education of any kind, and fewer still who are able to pursue graduate study, and even fewer who are able to attend this particular school. This is a rarefied group in a rarefied place. The people here have worked fairly hard, but most also benefit from the results of accidents of birth or geography or economics. Something for me to think about, and I hope my classmates do too, because the overwhelming majority of the world's people will never enjoy such blessings.

New moves

So far things have been relatively quiet, although everyone should be moved in by now. The largeness of the campus means that even with several hundred students it still feels sparsely populated. I remember eight years ago when I started college as an eighteen-year old. I knew a lot less about myself, and I hope the intervening experiences shape me for the better while I'm here.

Tomorrow morning is the Dean's Welcome, which serves as counterpoint to a commencement which should take place a few years from now. It's the eve of a new experience for me, and where things will go from here is unknown. That's part of the excitement, the anticipation.