(Post) MBA Blog

I realise I'm probably months behind the rest of the world, but I've recently discovered the Best Of page on Craig's List, possibly the best writing on the web since Suck.com (note: not a dodgy site!). Funny, poetic, profound, in a thousand years an alien race will unearth this and realise just how beautifully messed up we really were...

____________

Weddings are tough work, make no mistake. I've had two consecutive weekends of weddings and it is really starting to catch up.

This time it was a very good friend Gregor and his lovely fiance Huda, tying the knot it a wonderful old castle up a mountain outside Passau - the City of Three Rivers (and about 50 churches).

Well, it was just about as nice a wedding as you could hope for: friends from around the world, a cracking best-man's speech, plenty of food, drink and dancing and a cool band, all in a grand old Bavarian dining hall.

I got a chance to catch up with a few friends from UCL who I hadn't seen in years and that was great.

And as for the city itself, windy old cobbled roads and beer gardens kept "zie krazee Londoners" going all night.

____________

The first of many weddings this year kicked off in style with a trip to Lisbon, Portugal, for the marriage of my old friend Cecilia to a very good bloke, Philip. Cecilia I met on my second Masters degree, so there were a bunch of old pals from the Institute of Education (London).

We spent half our time in Setubal, the next town from Lisbon. Lovely place. That's my big tip for those visiting Portugal - Lisbon, while being very nice in a Paris-ey kindo of way - is a little too commercialised for my tastes, while half an hour away in Setubal, you are greeted with the authentic Portugal.

The wedding was up a mountain in a fine old chapel with stunning views. The party followed until the wee hours. Food great, people great, weather great. Overseas weddings are A GOOD IDEA!

____________

The Magdalene College May Ball. Words that fill the studnets of this fine city with such anticipation. One of the most traditional and glamorous of the main Balls, it is the last to insist on white-tie for gentlemen. If you want the full low-down on the night, just go to the May Ball site.

I attended with a couple of MBAs: Alasdair, the May Ball Wizard, Stanislave, the Marketing Wizard and his charming wife Irina, the...er...Wifely Wizard. While there was no theme, you could say that in all it was one of the classiest nights of the Cambridge calendar and well worth the sizeable sum I paid for tickets.

The arrangements were surprisingly fiddly: paying for and picking up tickets, geting fitted and picking up the white-tie suit etc etc, and to be honest, the May Ball is not really aimed at working folk. Especially since I had to pretty much block out the whole of the next day to recover.

Highlights were The Thrills, who played 'Big Sur', among others, the ceilidh and I have to say, generally, the people: familiar faces in such a different light and new faces which is always nice.

And as I emerged from Magdalene at 6 in the morning, slightly worse for wear, none other than my boss swishes past on his morning jog as we exhange pleasantries. You couldn't make this stuff up.

____________

I have been in something of a black hole since my last blog a couple of months ago. Library House, along with the London School of Economics, EEDA & Create Partners launched The Gauntlet, a revolutionary online self-assessment tool for ambitious entrepreneurs, designed to teach them how investors think and to score them as if presenting to and being judged by a panel of venture capitalists. In essence a 'Virtual VC', no easy task, if only because VCs themselves rarely agree on what makes a good investment opportunity!

The big launch was 23rd May, involving the BBC, the FT, Telegraph and radio as well as branding consultants, PR advisors and legal professionals. Not to mention a constantly evolving internal structure of sales, operations, technical and the Directors, who all had to be kept abreast.

Not surprising then that I have been offline. But the launch was successful and we are pushing ahead full-steam, so I am back online.

____________

Fantastic!! I got a call from a Cambridge MBA friend about this; he then emailed the whole class and the email was so well written I had to include it.

If you don't want to read the whole thing (below), the upshot is that Oxford business school have plastered a whole slew of Cambridge MBAs on their course brochures! And yours truly takes up the whole of the front cover of the Exectutive MBA brochure (left)!! Well I never. Two MBAs in one year. I must be special!

As for Oxford, well, I don't like to be nasty but really, if they can't recognise their own students there must be something wrong. That kind of thing could never happen at Judge. I guess we must just really be better looking!

***
The main reason for this email is to highlight a serious transgression on
the part of Oxford's Said B-School:

I visited Oxford to show my wife around the 2nd best university in England.
As part of the tour, I took her to see the site for the most important
program in academia--the MBA program.

To my utter dismay, I spotted a royally wrong sin when we browsed through
their brochures--Oxford decided without consent from Cambridge to use our
Cambridge MBA students as their models for their brochures. I have attached
the evidences: our own Robbie (Max) appears on the cover of Said's
Executive MBA brochure! (I think Max is talking with Alex Barcardit and Ben
Davis in the pic). In addition, our party-animal Georg and our Arabian
beauty Miriam (appearing twice in different brochures) are also in the
brochures for biz programs!

I understand that Cambridge MBAs just look better than those from
Oxford--but to do this without notification and consent from us? -- totally
unforgivable and unacceptable!

Can we let this transgression pass without administering punitive
measures?! At the least, I felt we need to let the world know of this grave
transgression. Please forward this email as you see fit.
***

____________

I'm watching John Simpson of the BBC *right now* on TV commenting on the election in the US and would you believe: he's wearing a Magdalene tie!!

Further, I was watching a documentary about Arnie Schwarzenneger eariler in the day, and I could have sworn *he* was wearing a Magdalene tie as well!

What's going on? I'm willing to put money that the eventual President will be wearing a Magdalene tie.

Well now, that's my comment on the US election. Could it be any more trivial?

____________

It is my birthday today. I'm not having a big celebration - I'm too busy and too tired.

I don't know if that is a good sign.

But I will be meeting friends over the next four days and will be having, as Ben Hardy might say, a number of bijou celebrationettes in due course.


So, have I taken over the world yet?

No, but one step at a time eh?



____________