The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

U.S. Business schools losing foreign students: Economist

As I'm less than three months from starting an MBA program designed to foster international relationships, I don't know what to make of this:

[F]oreign (or, more euphemistically, "international") students are thinking twice about handing over their hard-earned and recession-hit cash for an education at a prestigious Western hall of academe.

... Big private business schools in America, already hit by the much lower valuations of their endowment funds, seem likely to take the biggest hit. The American-based Graduate Management Admissions Council (GMAC), a regular surveyor of MBA graduates and recruiters, presciently noted in its 2008 Global MBA Graduate Survey that "graduates who attended full-time MBA programmes outside their country of citizenship rated overall value lower compared with graduates who attended similar programmes in their home country".

... Three factors are likely to weigh heavily on international students’ willingness to travel abroad to study: financing their studies, fears about the jobs market and the availability or otherwise of good business schools in their home country.

I'm very interested to see the composition of my CCMBA class. So far, to judge by the 25 or so of us who have submitted biographies to the class portal, about 2/3 of us are from the U.S., 1/3 from the rest of the world.

The article mentions, as a tangent, that the U.K. Border Agency maintains a list of the top 50 MBA programs worldwide. Fuqua is on the list, which means Fuqua graduates can get a working visa from Britain under the Highly Skilled Workers scheme nearly automatically.

Oy, mein altekaker Kindle!

Via Sullivan, I suddenly feel very old:

We extracted about 75 percent of the responses on age (representing about 700 responses, taking equally from the earliest and most recent postings, which show very similar age distributions). Per John Makinson's quip at an LBF panel, over half of reporting Kindle owners are 50 or older, and 70 percent are 40 or older.

So many users said they like Kindle because they suffer from some form of arthritis that multiple posters indicate that they do or do not have arthritis as a matter of course. A variety of other impairments, from weakening eyes and carpal-tunnel-like syndromes to more exotic disabilities dominate the purchase rationales of these posters.

Wait! I'm not 40 yet! And I see just fine, with a little help.

This, on the day that I took a final exam in a class (Introduction to Microeconomics) in which every other student was younger than half my age. Yes, there were about 50 of us in there, and the day the Berlin Wall fell down I was older than they are now.

Sigh.

What to do, what to do

I had thought about writing a long entry on another technical aspect of the new version of Weather Now, but for the first time in weeks it's sunny and 20°C, and I just finished a final exam in economics. So, off to the dog park.

All y'all waiting for the lengthy technical stuff will just have to wait until it rains again.

Update: In the meantime, why not scratch your head, as I did, over meat business cards? Hmmm....

Welcome home from your RSS reader

Arriving home this evening, after three days in San Francisco and frequent email checking while there, Outlook presented me with 295 unread messages (not counting the hundreds of messages in my spam filter). Of these, almost all were on my RSS reader—75 Facebook status updates, 50 posts from Andrew Sullivan, etc., etc.

It's amazing how much better you can feel after hitting <Ctrl>+A, right-click, "Mark As Read". Problem: solved.

Still, I hate feeling like I missed something....

What's new in Weather Now, part 1

I announced Friday that I deployed a complete, ground-up rewrite of Weather Now, but it looks a lot like the old version. So what's really different?

The differences between the versions go all the way down to the operating system. Version 3.1, which I launched in July 2007, ran on ASP.NET 2.0, SQL Server 2005, and a motley collection of sub-components I wrote from 1999 to 2004. The current version runs on ASP.NET 3.5, SQL Server 2008, and completely new components I re-wrote from first principles starting in September 2007.

I've got a lot of technical information about the foundation code, called the Inner Drive Extensible Architecture, over at my professional website. The IDEA handles all the nuts and bolts of the Weather Now application: messaging, database access, measurement conversions, time zones, and on and on.

The next layer up from that is the Gazetteer, version 0.5, which I wrote as an interim product to bridge between the geographical database that ran Weather Now 2.0 through 3.1, and the completely-new geographical database I'm planning for 2010.

Right under the user interface (UI) layer is another set of components dealing specifically with weather. Like the Gazetteer 0.5, the Weather 3.5 components bridge between the existing (2.0/3.0/3.1) weather data and the new design I'm working on. The combination of Gazetteer 0.5 and Weather 3.5 means that I could rewrite the application without worrying about the database.

Finally, at the top, a completely-rewritten user interface, written just in the last few weeks. (I had to write all the invisible stuff first.)

You can see an obvious problem with this, at least from a P.R. perspective: it's really hard to see any differences between old and new, unless you know what to look for.

Over the next few weeks, I'll describe in more detail what changed. I'll start with an issue that bugged the heck out of everyone, including me, for years.

Here's the top of the old home page:

There's the truly annoying measurement drop-down, showing "Aviation" as the current measurement system, and the temperature and wind readings from Chicago, showing degrees Celsius and knots, respectively. Every time you go to a new page, the application resets to Aviation, even if you tell it repeatedly you want to use English or Metric measures.

Here's the new version:

No dropdown. And, for people using U.S. English as their default language (your browser automatically communicates this information), the application defaults to degrees Fahrenheit and miles per hour.

A user from France, however, would see this:

So how do you change what you see? The new Preferences page, which not only lets you choose any available language or measurement system, but also remembers what you've chosen for your whole session—or permanently, if you have cookies enabled.

All the new code I developed for the application made fixing this long-standing annoyance almost trivially easy. Still, it's not complete yet. Version 3.7, which I hope to release this autumn, will allow users to create their own profiles, permanently storing not only their language and measurement choices, but also things like what they want shown on the home page.

There's another thing the screen shots show that you may have noticed. I'll talk about that next time.

Weather Now 3.5

Weather Now 3.5 is now the official, public version of my 9½-year-old demo. I first launched the site in September 1999 as a scripted ASP application, and last deployed a major update (version 3.0) on 1 January 2007.

As threatened promised, I'll have a lot more to say about it in the next few days. But I should address the first obvious question, "Why does it look almost identical to the previous version?" Simply: because my primary goal for this release was to duplicate every feature of the existing application, without adding new features unless absolutely required. It also had to run on the existing databases. That's why this version is 3.5, not 4.0 (which I hope to finish in early 2010).

I couldn't avoid some user interface (UI) differences, mainly because I used better design techniques than in the last release. And just as a matter of course, as I re-wrote each UI feature, I corrected or obviated numerous defects along the way. That said, version 3.5 has all of the features that 3.1 had, and any URLs that worked in 3.1 will work in 3.5.

I invite everyone to play with the application, and let me know about any defects or hiccups you discover. I think you'll find that it's an improvement over the last version.

Noted with minimal comment

This passage from Almost Perfect, Pete Peterson's autobiography of his days at WordPerfect Corp., inspired me to get out of bed, walk to my computer, and post a blog entry:

We on the Board had no one to blame for the delays but ourselves. The project directors we had chosen were inexperienced managers, and they made the mistakes inexperienced managers make. They were prone to overly optimistic forecasts and had trouble chewing people out when they missed their deadlines. Another of our mistakes was that we waited too long to add new programmers to the project....

And here is the context of that passage, which Peterson, without irony or self-awareness, set up only two paragraphs earlier:

I was not entirely honest in making the admission [that our release date had slipped]. Rather than go with a realistic date or a vague date or no date at all, I announced a hoped-for second quarter release, which was the most optimistic date from our most optimistic developer.

Yes, the Board had no one to blame...but they blamed the managers and developers. Yes, the managers had trouble chewing people out...for missing deadlines the programmers thought impossible and never agreed to. Yes, the programmers came up with a range of estimates...which turned out to include the actual ship date. And of course, if you want to foster openness and communication, the best way to do that has to include, without exception, ignoring the people doing the work, exhorting their managers to chew them out, and setting wildly unrealistic requirements in the first place.

WordPerfect Corporation had the best word processor on the planet in 1990, but somehow could never grow beyond themselves. Almost Perfect should serve as a cautionary tale to every entrepreneur, everywhere, to get out of the way of their own creations, lest they hang on and watch their babies die.

The third way, of which I heartily approve, is to eschew growth entirely. If done honestly and with full acceptance of the consequences, an entrepreneur can live a long and happy life running a business out of his living room. But having decided to grow beyond that point, the entrepreneur must necessarily give up total control of his organization in exchange for partial control over something orders of magnitude larger. One can be king, or one can be rich, but one can almost never have both.

Feature complete

The new Weather Now demo is feature-complete, meaning it has all of the pieces required for release. I will push it out to production, replacing the current demo, tomorrow morning, after I make some configuration changes to the web server it's going on. But because you read this blog, you've got a sneak preview.

Over the next few days I'll be writing about the demo, why it's completely new even though it looks an awful lot like the old version, and what I'll be doing in the next few months to improve it.

Almost sad

I haven't finished all of Almost Perfect yet, but I think I understand now what happened to WordPerfect Corp.: they had accidental success, naïvely thought they authored the success, and never thought strategically.

Now, possibly, I'm imputing Pete Peterson's own failures to the entire company, but I have to assume the other board members condoned his approach or they wouldn't have kept him on for so long. Peterson himself seems hopelessly without self-awareness, stumbling from decision to decision without a thought to the implications of each and without any coherent plan for how they all fit together. He is, in the Myers-Briggs jargon, an off-the-charts Thinker making him almost indifferent to other people's feelings, with an added load of Sensing making him detail-driven with a disdain for abstractions. For example:

For practically every week from December of 1989 through mid-1990, I invited 16 different managers to have lunch with me for three consecutive days starting on Tuesday. After lunch each day, I spoke for about an hour and a half. ...

Near the end of the first lecture, I explained what WordPerfect Corporation was not. This set the stage for the next two days, when I would explain what WordPerfect Corporation was.

WordPerfect Corporation was not a platform for personal achievement, a career ladder to other opportunities, or a challenging opportunity for personal improvement. The company did not put the needs of the individual ahead of its own. The company was not concerned about an employee's personal feelings, except as they related to the company's well-being.

WordPerfect Corporation was not intended to be a social club for the unproductive. While other companies might condone many personal or social activities at the office, ours did not. Things like celebrating birthdays, throwing baby showers, collecting for gifts, selling Tupperware or Avon, managing sports tournaments, running betting pools, calling home to keep a romance alive or hand out chores to the children, gossiping or flirting with co-workers, getting a haircut, going to a medical or dental appointment, running to the cafeteria for a snack, coming in a little late or leaving a little early, taking Friday afternoon off, and griping about working conditions were all inappropriate when done on company time.

In other words, how employees did things was more important than other concerns that one might prefer to use as yardsticks for employee value: productivity, creativity, well being, cameraderie. All right, as my dad says, "it's their football," and if you work for them you play by their rules. But contrast that passage with this one, from the same chapter:

[A requirement] was that we needed to communicate freely and frequently. In many companies it was common for supervisors to keep information to themselves, conceal their mistakes whenever possible, and never allow subordinates to go over their heads. I wanted a company where information could flow freely without regard to formal lines of communication. I imagined a room filled with light, without any portion remaining in darkness. I wanted a company where no one kept secrets and where everything was kept out in the open. Advisors who expected their employees to be so loyal to them that they would not take problems to someone else were exactly the ones I wanted to kick out of the company. Any loyalty should be toward the company, its purpose and objectives, not to individual advisors. Advisors who did not want the light to shine in their domain did not deserve their positions. Lines of communication should be allowed to go in any direction. If employees made mistakes, then the mistakes needed to be known so they could be corrected and avoided in the future. I wanted a company where employees could make mistakes, admit them freely, and learn how to do better without fearing for their jobs.

That's great if every person in the company is exactly like him: heads down, ISTJ, work is for working and home is for everything else. But to most people, in my experience, generating that kind of atmosphere requires flexibility around the periphery. In other words, if people have the freedom to work in the specific ways that make sense, and if they're judged by their output rather than how they achieve the output, they're usually happier. The occasional office baby shower might "cost" two hours of "company time," but it pays back disproportionately in productivity if it helps people feel happy about coming to work.

More practically, though, Peterson demanded loyalty towards the company while at the same time telling people they have no way to advance within the company because of its flat management structure. What he fails to understand, despite getting close to seeing the patterns while remaining maddeningly oblivious to them, is that in an organization the size of WordPerfect Corp., politics happens. It's an emergent phenomenon of groups. By "groups" I mean in a sociological sense: any aggregations of two or more people.

Throughout the book Peterson shows these amazing blind spots, often on the same theme. He wants people to openly speak their minds to management, yet "[f]or years I was the person most feared in the company. If I walked down a hallway, I was used to hearing the sound of desk drawers closing as people hid their snacks from view." The mind boggles.

Not too long after the events described above, the employees of the company presented a petition to the other two board members to have Peterson fired—and they fired him. Shortly after they sold out to Novell, and WordPerfect became irrelevant.

More later.