Mormons do business?

Found this Video Interesting.
http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/stock-ticker-video.aspx?ticker=%24INDU&vid=e6d88598-d9af-4210-a9fc-af8d1ec535d4

Perhaps I'll be in a similar one one day? :)

It was kind of across the board. I feel it highlighted too much that Mormons would hire other Mormons. That might be scary to non-Mormons, and while I agree that there is networking to be done in the Mormon Circle, Mormons will hire those that do not practice the faith as well.

Time to build some businesses!

the work is done

So graduation isn't until the end of the week, but I have completed every last effort I will perform to earn my MBA....
shouldn't be my last post, I want to give myself some summaries from the courses I completed. However, I am done. Everything I learn from here will be for me and not for this piece of paper I'm going to get soon (and a very valuable piece of paper I hope it is!)

CAGR

I am doing some research consulting for a company and came across a new term I hadn't heard before: CAGR

Turns out it mean Compound Annual Growth Rate. I figured it would be good for a MBA Blog to know about this term.

Toothpaste Trophy!

In the International Marketing Class (MBA 658), team "Great Asia" won simulation for selling Toothpaste in Latin America. -- We're showing off our awards. Who can't use some Spanish Colgate with a bow on top? I'll be putting it on the mantle above the fireplace soon.


Nice Job Kenji, Kyle, & Flavio! -- BYU will be at a loss when you leave this month (... I'm getting all teary eyed)

Pricing & Positioning

Just wanted to announce that I am doing a horrible job of paying attention in Pricing and Positioning right now.

:(

Excel is lowering my morals

In my class about Pricing and Positioning, we've been running a lot of analytics in both SPSS & Excel.

I think this is kind of funny. It seems Excel 2007 is a little more accurate than the 2003 version. So when you save a file in the 03 format, it sometimes questions ones fidelity. Luckily the loss is minor.


This error made me laugh a little too much. My wife thought I was just a big dork. But I kept seeing it every time I saved.

Hopefully once I graduate the BYU MBA, I won't have my morals questioned so easily.

.......... yeah, I am kind of a big dork.

Last Semester -- Woo!

School starts tomorrow. Just wanted to everyone a big "Good Luck" shout out for this semester.

.......... And to all the 2nd years in the BYU MBA program, enjoy this last semester before life starts back up.

lot's of snow

Utah Valley has gotten lot of snow this week. Actually its pretty awesome timing for Winter Break.

I've been living in apartments for many years now so this was the first time in years that I've had to shovel. Not Bad, actually--I liked getting forced outside. BYU's MBA Program wants me inside in front of a computer all day. :)

Here is how my car looked about 5 minutes ago.

Citing MLA -- (we still do this dridgery in an MBA?)

When it comes to citing sources in the research papers I write, my favorite resource showing appropriate methods for MLA style is here.

I'm just noticing it is dropping in the search-rankings so I wanted to give it a boost. I have been using it throughout my MBA and it has been very useful.

tired?

My eyes are getting ready to close.... a little more studying to go :)

I guess this post is more philosophical. I remember at orientation last year, Kristen Adair spoke that we would be tired. Coming off my internship and back into school, I've really been on a high. I'm trying hard to learn as much as I can; I find so much so fascinating.

And so I'm tired-- but my goals are being achieved. And yet, it is very easy for me to become "un-tired" .... but I have to will it.
I've got Pivot Tables and Leadership Skills a plenty.
I've got creative questions and "needs to believe" galore.
You need some tornado strategies? I've got twenty.
But who cares?
No Big Deal.
I want more!

I'm really writing a bright side to this story. Through pushing my limits, I'm seeing they're further away. I can do more. I can give more to my family and my employer-- And I can still have more time for fun. I guess I've got a six-sigma on life (actually that would be terrible)

So I'd like to end this song and blog with a toast:
"MBA is interesting. It really is here to help me. So flow with it and take all I can-- and then ride those horses all the way to the bank (yeehah)"

St. George is Hot as Hell & then I'm going to work like it

Wow, I seemed kind of insane writing that Monday Night-- it was late. I'm sure some principles exist in there still.

Well, Labor Day weekend is here, that means all that stands between me and my second year of BYU Marriott School of Businesses MBA Program is a quick trip to St. George.

I'm out of here in a few hours!

Flush DNS

I don't have much of a tech blog, and since I'm dealing with websites still, I thought I'd just get this recorded here.

Just released the new website, and its not populating to my browser correctly. To get my computer to recognize the new IP Address we're pointing our website to, I ran the command:
ipconfig /flushdns

Wow, as a BYU MBA, I'm learning a wide array of skills. Brigham Young University helped me get hooked up with a very cool internship.

Soon to say Goodbye

I'm taking a break from packing to say I'm moving out of Wymount! And while packing sucks, air conditioning blows cool air all over the house and I'm excited to have it again. (figure I'm about 20 days short of a year)

So first years, stay away... stay as far away as you can.

Hope everyone is having a good summer.

how to present yourself

Today, was almost my favorite day of the month. Its not the last day of the semester, but the last day of classes. I have my last presentation at the end of the day and... it went ok.

Now, I'm sitting up: can't sleep. I also cannot talk myself into studying for finals. Instead, I'm watching all the jokes portions of the talk shows. I usually am trying to sleep during Lettermen and Leno, so I catch Conan, then Craig Ferguson (who I think will be fired when his contract expires), and then if its on Jimmy Kimmel.

I usually don't like Kimmel; I was turned off by that Damon/Affleck song-- which I saw last time I couldn't sleep. However, I've got to say Jimmy Kimmel sure does present himself well. Here is a guy who's overweight, less established, and probably benefiting from the make-up artists before he goes on camera.

And despite all the setback he is by far the most calm, cool, and collected. I think his rebuttals to random things are funnier (I assume they don't get that material from writers). And I feel the others have to resort to lots of gimmicks (Conan honked his nose like a clown.) But J. just stands there confident, knowing what he's going to say, and rolling with the punches in a very funny way.

So I'm writing all this because I just gave a presentation for Venture Capital Class. I did ok. Nothing fantastic, but I think if I were to try to learn to be a good speaker, I'd look to Kimmel for inspiration and strategy. And I think it takes practice, the confidence can come naturally, but prep'ing is also necessary.

So we'll see. I'm not sure how I'll learn from Jimmy yet. But Iwill probably watch him sometimes (until the crudeness begins to ramp up) and helpfully I'll get to be a better presenter. But watching him has let me know I can handle the fact that my stomach is more noticeable than I'd like it to be. So its nice. At least I got to be slightly inspired.

read!

So I'm sitting here in the foyer of the BYU's Tanner Buisness building trying to get an accounting assignment done. Our professor likes to write a lot of his own cases so you have to learn to read into what he wants.

My friend and I have been trying to figure out what the heck this professor is talking about. Reading over the assignment about 5 times and debating what these different words mean.... then we decided to look up some of the vocab in the text's glossary.

Well we found out that before doing this assignment we need to read the chapter assigned as study.

DUH!

Ok, I'll quite trying to take the easy way and actually learn something.

Yoasis -- Pretty good job

A few weeks ago in my Brand Management class, we had the chance to help HogiYogi choose what they would call their new entrant into the latest Yogurt craze that is going on.

Initially HogiYogi was going to go with "YogurRXt" -- not a good idea. They had a creative idea around it, and they thought it tied into "Health" well. But Yogurt Health means organic not sterile hospital. Plus calling sizes something like "Overdose" while creative is going to bring back very bad memories for some people.

What they decided on was Yoasis. I agree with them that of the ideas put up, Yoasis was probably the best presentation. The student team that came up with Yoasis had some very faulty logic as to why this idea should be picked (like a "National" survey that was sent to who they knew in the MBA Program, or the fact that it competed with names they made up and not the names that other teams presented).

Nonetheless, the Yoasis team by far had the best presentation. One team actually spelled yogurt backwards for a sound saying "True-Joy" but spelt "Trugoy." Does anyone really want the name "Goy" in their business name? Unless you were told to say 'joy' you'd be making an ethnic-slur every time you said the business name.

So my wife and I went to Yoasis last night. They've done a pretty good job with it I think. They did use the water-fountains idea from my team's presentation. They made a really nice "sit and lounge" modern atmosphere right next to Yoasis. Because of this, I think that if there was a Starbucks in Provo, this location would be able to take a sizable portion of that Starbucks' market.

The price was great; I'm sure that will help them capture a lot of the student market.

The actual product is wonderful!

In fact, I only had two problems with it. Yoasis has a flat screen where it shows video of natural, oceanic places. When I was there a documentary concerning sea-lions was playing. The problem is they play the sound as well. So while I was there trying to talk, I felt the documentary kept invading my conversations. Perhaps muting the sound like Costa Vida does with its tv's would be a good idea. Of course I can see the flipside to that too. I love surfing and I always want to hear details of the waves pictured at Costa Vida.

Second, I love the ocean. I graduated from BYU-Hawaii. I will probably move back to Hawaii within the next 10-years. And large portions of my vacations will be spent scuba-diving all over the world until I am back in Hawaii. So when I see a product use the word "Oasis" and then show me a tropical island.... I don't like it. I've heard many others say "Isn't an Oasis in the desert?" Well, I agree! Its funny but it is actually kind of offensive to me and those are my two passions in the world: the Ocean, and the Desert (of Southern Utah).

So without biasing this with my clear opinion, I do think the Imagery Yoasis is using to brand itself does create a little customer confusion.

All in all though, I think they did a pretty good job and I'll patronize it once or twice a month while I'm here for another year. With the rush they were in, I believe they chose the best idea and they've done some good implementations. As always, there are tradeoffs, and that more than anything is what keeps critics in business!

Harvard Busines Review

So does anyone read the Harvard Business Review? Until MBA School, I was never that interested in it, I thought it was professors at Harvard writing a few things here and there and then supplementing it with their students' papers.

This last year at BYU, I have read a lot of articles from it. We purchases these articles in our course packets. I'm not sure if my professors are just choosing the cream of the crop (well actually I would hope they are), but these articles are amazing and packed with insights. In fact I've noticed many books are written after an author explores the ideas in these articles first. I've read a lot of books where the whole thing wasn't much more useful than what is in an 15 page article anyway.

I also like that it is professors and experts from all over the world that submit articles-- its not just those at Harvard like I had thought.

Anyway, I'm going to begin reading the HBR in the Library over the next year and if I feels its as good as the articles I'm getting from my MBA professors, then I'll probably be a subscriber for many years to come.

ideas working

Well, my "Extra 30 Minutes" idea is working. I just finished my Minto Document for Communications MBA 505. Its on that book I wrote all the notes about and kept complaining about. I will upload the paper in a couple of days after finals have passed.

So it worked and I just gave that extra effort and got done with it. Now its 9Am and I have the whole day to do with as I please.

Interesting though, my fear of getting lazy didn't come true. The new fear is giving that extra 10% of effort that can have huge pay-offs.

Finance & Operations Finals are over

Well I've done the operations and finance finals. They went pretty well, I definitely think I've done better on them than I did on the midterm. I have learned a couple of things about taking finals too. I guess "finals" are not going to be a large part of life, but I've got 3 more rounds of them after this week, so I better remember what I've learned.

First, for the finance final, I kept telling myself that I needed to study Beta. I'll bet I could have studied it in about 20 Minutes, but I just couldn't force myself to do it. Well, there was a lot of the test dedicated to Beta and I really regretted it afterwards.

Same thing with the test for operations class that I just got out of. I thought I needed to study some equations slightly more (I actually did ok with this) and a quick review on setting up multiple workstations (it would have taken 10 minutes) but I couldn't make myself do it.

Now I won't lose huge amounts of points, but it could have taken me from 85% to 90% I imagine. Its not that I was lazy, I did do a lot of study. Its that 30 more minutes of work could have given me a shot at acing those tests.

So the principle I learned is: Cover what you know you need to know. Don't fight the last few minutes of work.

Also, I studied like crazy and used the flash card program and it helped me to learn this stuff very detailedly. I need to make sure I do that in the future.

Ok 2 more tests, neither of which require much study and then I've got 1 semester done of my BYU MBA!!!!!!

Finals -- they're here :(

Well, finals have started. I've been studying finance with a Ademar, Steve B., and Victor every night this week. It's been kind of focusing on 1 subject and having a lot of jokes in between. Yesterday, I had to be home to sign for a package, so we all studied at my apartment and made some frozen pizzas while we studied.

All this studying has felt good in that I feel like I'm putting the necessary effort to become capable at this subject.

I also got up at about 7:30 this morning to go meet up with these guys to study operations/logistics. And now I'm back in my office typing up papers on Minto Readings (this is the communications final). I'm not worried about surviving until Thursday, I just hope I don't get lazy, I have that habit.

Well good luck to anyone that may be going though this. I recommend not being too lazy throughout the res of the semester and then the week before finals will probably be a little easier.