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.