Riz’s Rotman Blog

I think I’ll start to read The Opposable Mind like Idris did in Denver:  

People often complain that creative types are difficult to manage if they can be managed at all and most of high maintenance in nature. There is some truth here but I don’t necessarily buy all that. My favorite types of creative people are what I called the “Da Vincis”. They are people who can use both sides of the brain. May be this is what Roger Marin refers to as “Integrative Thinker”. I picked up his book The Opposite Mind (while I was stucked in Denver airport for a connecting flight back from Palm Spring where we had a planning session) and I was reading it during this holiday. I buy 10 books a month and I read only one of them. Here is a good one.

As mentioned before, I just wanted to do a basic wrap-up of my thoughts on the 1st semester courses. I know that my opinion differs from some other people’s opinions on these courses so just keep that in mind.

• Corporate Financing
  • Interesting and fun course
  • Great Professor (Heather Irwin)
  • Very practical knowledge
  • Funny stories told in class
  • Not a lot of “high-level” new learning, it’s mainly applying what you learned in 1st year to many other situations. A lot of very good detail on the intricacies of how companies raise capital and return it to shareholders
  • A must take for anyone who will be working in finance
  • A moderate to high workload
• Real Estate Economics
  • My favorite course this year
  • A course that I think everyone should take
  • You learn some really interesting theory and it allows you to understand a lot of important information for anyone in business
  • The course I probably learned the most from this year
  • Amazing professor (William Strange)
  • A low workload until the end of the year when your final paper is due (of course you could write it during the rest of the semester). The toughest exam I wrote this semester
• Management Science
  • Not a fan of this course. It would have been useful if I wasn’t an Engineer. It’s very simplistic numeric work relative to what I’ve done in the past. For anyone who isn’t good with numbers but is looking to be, this course might be good for you.
  • A moderate workload. The Exam questions weren’t hard, they were just annoyingly time consuming, requiring a lot of repetitive “grunt work.”
• Entrepreneurship
  • This course is NOT very useful if you want to learn how to be an entrepreneur but I don’t think any course can do that. If you want to be an entrepreneur, read The Art of the Start, join a startup, and make mistakes! The book (I feel) is a great guide for how to accomplish things and what is important in a startup. This course is really much more useful if you’re interested in analysis of existing companies and how they got big or a little practice writing business plans
  • Some good speakers
  • A low to moderate workload. No final exam
  • For the person who asked (in the previous post’s comments) about coming to Rotman as an entrepreneur, let me say a few things:
    • I’m not personally sure if the MBA is the right program for entrepreneurs, maybe something like UW’s MBET program (here’s a blog) is something to consider? It was a program I strongly considered before I applied to Rotman but decided against it given that it was a new program back then. By now they may have gotten the kinks out.
    • All the data shows a negative relationship between entrepreneurship and MBA graduates. That is, if you’re looking to meet a whole bunch of people interested in doing a startup, look elsewhere. I think this has a lot to do with the opportunity cost of having your MBA and then doing a startup—you simply get paid much more with the MBA at a large company so it costs you a lot more to risk that on a startup.
    • I’m not saying you shouldn’t do the MBA. Many people have done it and started great companies, just make sure you evaluate the reasons for doing the MBA and consider the tradeoffs versus other programs or just joining  a start up, and always remember the costs of the MBA (both cash and time/opportunity costs)
• Corporate e-business strategies
  • I was disappointed with this course because I didn’t really feel I learned very much. If you know nothing about social technologies or how companies have use the web to make $$$, this course could be useful. I’m just so immersed in it already (e.g. this blog) that I didn’t get much out of it.
  • The all day saturday classes are just brutal!!!!!
  • A moderate workload. No final exam

I hope that proves useful to a few people and perhaps spurs some discussion. Let me know if you have any questions. Merry Christmas.

Facebook is a great product but I’ve blogged before about how I think the valuation is a little wonky. Fred Wilson, an investor in my favorite video podcast, has said the following which gives me some confidence that there are still rational people in the VC world:

 If I had to buy Facebook right now, I think $5 billion to $7 billion would be the right price. 

I have to admit, that’s a lot more than my $2 billion to $4.5 billion back of the envelope calculation but given how quickly I calculated the number, and that it was calculated in the summer, I can see how his valuation could be more accurate. At least it’s not $15 billion!

Now for something Rotman related.

Exams finished on Thursday and there was a little party. I’ve just been blowing off steam since. Picture from Thursday:

I’m feeling quite euphoric about how close I am to the end of school. This next week should also be a lot of fun since some close old friends are coming into Toronto to visit.

This blog won’t see a lot of activity until January 7th but I hope to post about a few things eventually:

• My overall thoughts on classes from 1st semester
• Any thoughts on the Venture Capital intensive course
• My experiences with Integrative Thinking at Rotman (I got an e-mail request to post about this).

Happy new year everyone. I’m off to play some video games.

I got invited by RIM to see a talk by Roger Martin (yes, the Dean of Rotman) on his new book the Opposable Mind. So I threw on my suit and headed over to the Royal York.

Before the talk, I had a chance to speak to the Dean for a few minutes, and this further confirmed my earlier assessment that he’s super smart… super-duper smart. (certainly smarter than someone who uses terms like “super-duper”)

The talk was a pretty good overview of the book and the key ideas. I’m a lot more excited now to take his course. I also bought the book and am going to try and give it a read during the christmas break. I wanted to start reading it now but I have an exam on Thursday and should really start getting my notes together etc.

A picture from the talk (kind of blurry and small, sorry):

Came across this post where the comments are just gold. Some managers don’t even think. I love this one:

I used to work at a factory and our “perk” one year was that we got a free bag. It was a very nice bag…..which we had to make. Yeah, we had a “rush order” for an item and worked like mad to finish it in time then were given the exact item. Classy, I know.

(Source)

For future reference (I should have logically already figured this out): They subtract the following from signing bonuses: Federal Tax, CPP, EI. Also, given the size of most signing bonuses, they tax you at the highest tax bracket. ARG! On top of that EI really makes no sense to me given I can’t collect.

The government always gets their cut I guess but I’m kind of pissed off right now. I just “lost” a substantial chunk of change. I’ll get some of it back later but ARG!

Shouldn’t blog when angry so I’ll end this post here. 

I always find my webserver stats kind of interesting: How do people get to my site? What’s the most popular post? Things like that. Here are the stats for search terms that have brought people to my site this month (so far):

Things to note:

• Some first years are obviously been brought to my domain while doing some research on exams (evidence: financial accounting 2006 exam rotman, and rotman 2007 strategy exam).
• The main search terms bringing people to my domain are rotman related
• My name is being used in some of the search terms. This leads me to believe that a few people know of this blog but just don’t remember the URL/domain. Well, tunerds.com is an old buy of mine and I don’t think I plan on changing. It has become a sort of online identity.

Something else interesting is that hits to the Rotman blog are WAYYYYYY up so far this month, so much so that it looks like this will (probably) be the first month that hits to the Rotman blog will out number hits to any other part of the site (excluding my tumble blog but that’s not really getting much traction from what I can tell). It kind of makes sense for hits to be up though, it’s MBA application season.

So I guess, hi to all of you applying to MBA program. :) 

There’s a picture of me in the Rotman brochure! I’m a hansom devil.  

It’s officially exam time! Well not quite, I still have a stupid e-biz class to go to all day saturday which will hurt my studying since my corporate finance exam is on Monday.

I am also in the process of setting myself up a pretty great next semester since if my Add/Drops go through (not sure about one of them and wait listed for another) I’ll only have class on Thursday and Friday! It wasn’t planned (entirely) that way. I did pick courses that sounded interesting to switch into. My new schedule will look like this if everything works out:

Thursday:

• 8:30 am - 2:00 pm -> Case analysis and presentation 
• 4:12 pm - 6:15 pm -> Advanced Game Theory
• 6:15 pm - 8:15 pm -> Business Law (Wait listed in position 1)

Friday:

• 1:00 pm - 5:00 pm -> The Opposable Mind (taught by Roger Martin but the change request is currently “pending,” whatever that means. I’m pretty sure that this is the text book :) )

It’s all about the 2-day work week.

I’ll let you know how that turns out as well as post my “exit-thoughts” on the courses from this semester. 

It’s alwasy a bad feeling when you’re heading to school before the sun is up. I have to hand in a Real Estate Economics group paper and give a 10 minute presentation this morning.

The topic? Understanding the Rosedale—St. James Town Neighbourhood disconnect. It’s interesting to try and understand why 2 such totally different area’s exist so close together for so long. How can (on of) the richest area be right next to the poorest area in Toronto?

Anyways, I’m off.