Entries from April 2009
I’ve received quite a few emails from folks who are considering applying law school. It’s interesting what they share in common:
they’re all young, smart, and ambitious.
they attended well-known undergraduate programs. In fact, several of them graduated from Ivy schools. They have all done exceptionally well throughout their academic careers.
they have limited work [...]
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Tags: Go Back to School · MBA · MBA or Not
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Lately I start to hear from fellow readers about unannounced layoffs. Here are a couple of examples:
Juniper Networks quietly started laying people off in January. Most of the layoffs the reader knew about were in Engineering and IT, and a large number of them were in management roles.
Amazon.com had also laid off employees in [...]
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Tags: News
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Oracle announced this morning that it is buying Sun Microsystems in a deal valued approximately $7.4 billion.
I’d like to offer a few quick thoughts:
This is a brilliant strategic move by Larry Ellison, a master of acquiring enterprise technology companies.
Oracle’s bread-and-butter is database. Its single biggest threat is the open source MySql database. With [...]
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Tags: Company Analysis · News · Product Management
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I enjoyed reading New York Times best-seller The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. But, I feel that Thomas Friedman painted an overly rosy and simplistic picture of globalization.
Let me tell you a true story.
I have a friend who works for one of the largest IT outsourcing companies in [...]
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Tags: Frustration@Work · Work/Life Balance
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A few years ago, right before I graduated from business school, I saw a job ad from a GMAT preparation company — it’s looking for GMAT instructors. One of the job requirements was that they only hire people who had scored in the 99th percentile on an actual GMAT test.
It’s one of their key [...]
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Tags: MBA · Management
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Please take a look at the following table. What do these men share in common?
Name
Birthday
Age as of 4/18/2009
David Murdock
4/10/1923
86
Sheldon Adelson
8/4/1933
75
Warren Buffet
8/30/1930
78
Charlie Munger
1/1/1924
85
Rupert Murdoch
3/11/1931
78
All of them are
more than 75 years old
billionaire
still working
They could all be retired a long time ago.
But, they’re still working because they love what they do. They’re successful because [...]
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Tags: Career Fast Track · Work/Life Balance
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We’re having the most severe economic downturn since World War II. Everyone is trying to hold onto their jobs. Many companies have suspended merit-based pay raises and bonuses. If you want to increase your take-home pay, you will have to do it on your own.
Let me challenge you: assume you’ll hold onto your current [...]
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Tags: Beat Recession · Learning and Growing · Start-up Success
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When I applied MBA program eight years ago, there were a few MBA admission consultants. I never used any of them. But, if you search "MBA Admission Consultant " on Google today, it’s mind-boggling how many MBA admission consultants are coming back in the search results.
MBA Admission Consulting is a booming industry. I have [...]
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Tags: MBA
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I started elementary school one and half years later than my peers.
Although I finished all of the required classes in four years in college, I didn’t feel that I was ready for the real world. So, I stayed for one extra semester to take classes I enjoyed. (I paid for all of the [...]
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Tags: Corporate Ladder · Learning and Growing
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A friend works for a start-up company. They’re on track to generate $30 million revenue this year, which will allow the company break even. Eighty percent of the revenue are from the US, while the other twenty percent are from western Europe. They still have about $10 million of cash that they received as part [...]
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Tags: Build a Company · Innovation · Start-up Success
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