Pawlenty to be McCain’s running mate, according to futures market

The major news outlets, including the Drudge Report, have yet to report the identity of Senator McCain’s vice presidential running mate but within the past hour Intrade.com has seen a spike in the futures of Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty and a parallel drop in those of Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney.

This is one of the most useful demonstration of the power of information and the futures market that I have seen in a very long time. While I like Pawlenty and think it's an excellent choice, I am a bit disturbed about what Intrade.com is also telling us about the likely winner of the election in November.

Analyzing FiOS from an MBA perspective

Today’s New York Times had an article on the progress that Verizon is making in its endeavor to use fiber optics to deploy internet, video, and landline voice services to major markets around the country. The article interviewed various analysts and industry experts on whether Verizon will ever be able to recoup the $23 billion invested into the FiOS product.

 

The paper’s web site features a very detailed walkthrough of the analysis by Craig Moffett, Harvard Business School alum and analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, who has been extremely bearish on Verizon’s latest investment. Moffett carefully weights the amount invested into FiOS versus its benefits. His analysis touched on many of the major topics I learned during my first semester in business school. It talked about strategy (a disruptive innovation created a need for traditional telecom companies to respond), finance (tax shield, discounted cash flow), financial accounting (how FiOS allows Verizon to make its balance sheets look better), cost accounting (how to allocate costs to calculate a cost per customer), marketing (lifetime value per customer ), some of the major topics anyone with an MBA is expected to understand.

 

I hope the folks at the Harvard Business School Press decide to write a case on this sometime in the future.

AT&T High Speed Internet service's latest marketing ploy

A friend of mine in Chapel Hill recently called AT&T, his landline provider, and ordered the AT&T High Speed Internet service, delivered via DSL. He quickly received in the mail his Motorola DSL modem and instructions on how to hook up the service. When he was unable to get the service working after having clearly connected his devices properly, he turned to AT&T for assistance.

 

It wasn’t until after multiple phone calls and at least two appointments with a technician going out onto his property that he found an AT&T representative who told him the true reason why the last light on his modem was not blinking properly. His location was physically too far from the central office to receive the provisioning for the DSL service.

 

Even though my MBA comes with a concentration in marketing, I have yet to come across a business situation where a service provider has embarked on a strategy of marketing a service to customers who are physically unable to receive the service. Maybe that’s why I didn’t get too far during my second year in business school when I interviewed for the AT&T Management Leadership Program.

How your alma mater affects your salary

The Wall Street Journal today had an article about a recent survey by PayScale Inc. on the salaries of college graduates from 300 major universities in the United States. The survey is unique for in addition to recording the starting salaries of recent graduates, it also measures the salaries of graduates who are currently in their mid-career (which it defines as 10 to 20 years post graduation). Schools are divided into four categories, liberal arts, state, party, and Ivy League and respondents do not include those who have gone on to receive a more advanced degree such as an MBA.

 

“Even though graduates from all types of schools increase their earnings throughout their careers, their incomes grow at almost the same rate, according to the survey. For instance, the median starting salary for Ivy Leaguers is 32% higher than that of liberal-arts college graduates -- and at 10 or more years into graduates' working lives, the spread is 34%, according to the survey.

 

One reason why Ivy Leaguers outpace their peers may be that they tend to choose roles where they're either managing or providing advice, says David Wise, a senior consultant at Hay Group Inc., a global management-consulting firm based in Philadelphia. By contrast, state-school graduates gravitate toward individual contributor and support roles. "Ivy Leaguers probably position themselves better for job opportunities that provide them with significant upside," says Mr. Wise , adding that this is the first survey he's seen that correlates school choice to a point later in a career.

 

Also, more Ivy League graduates go into finance roles than graduates of other schools, and employers pay a premium for them, says Peter Cappelli, a professor of management and director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. "Dartmouth kids get paid more for the same job than kids from Rutgers are [doing]," he says.”

 

One interesting finding is that how much a professional in his mid-career gets paid has less to do with his choice of undergraduate major but more to do the industry choice and career direction that he chooses to pursue.

AOL Mail finally enters the 20th century

I was on my personal AOL webmail account tonight when I noticed something that I have not seen before, at least on AOL. On the left hand panel of the mail screen, sandwiched between the folders titled “Inbox” and “Sent” is a new folder called “Draft.” AOL webmail users can now save unfinished emails on their accounts without having to entertain complex workarounds such as saving them onto a Word document or emailing them to themselves.

 

When I went onto the AOL/AIM Mail Product Insider Blog to read the announcement, I realized that the real story is not the addition of the new functionality but the absence of it for so long. I first heard of Hotmail more than ten years ago before it was owned by Microsoft and I don’t recall it ever not having had the “Save as draft” functionality. The same can be said about other major providers of free email such as Yahoo! and Gmail. Yet AOL somehow has managed to survive for so long without adding this much needed functionality is a story within itself.

One truly “malicious web site”

At the company where I “work,” we use a service called Websense to block employees from looking at certain web sites on company time. Websense allows companies to set the desired levels of censorship, which usually depends on the corporate culture. At my company, in addition to the standard suspects such as pornographic and hateful sites, employees cannot access sites that offer other vices such as free email, streaming audio/video content, or social networking.

I first learned of this three months ago today when I started working and for the past three months, it's been interesting to learn that Websense classifies some of my regular internet destinations as "tasteless" and others as gambling sites. Yet I was still shocked the other day to learn that Websense classifies the Cavalier Daily web site as “malicious web site.” Not sure what the justification for that is, not that I disagree with the it considering how the paper used to run the nastiest quotes about me when I was in college.

Your best life now

I have been working at my new job for almost three months now and within the past month, I began to notice that I am actually beginning to like my post business school life quite a bit. Thursday night was a bit of a wild night – or about as wild as it can get for me not being in school. I kicked off the Fourth of July three day weekend by going to Bub’s for karaoke night. After two hours of watching townies and old people making an attempt to sing, me and a bunch of girls went to Lucy’s (the new name is P.T.’s Grille but I will forever call it Lucy’s) for 80s night. We had tons of fun even though we didn’t stay long enough to hear my favorite Journey song.

 

Afterwards I thought what a difference one year makes. A year ago that very same night I went out to eat by myself and afterwards drove by Franklin Street wishing I had some people to hang out with. And now for the second weeknight in the same week I went out late into the night with a bunch of people (part of the trick here is to make friends with teachers so during the summertime they don’t have to go to work).

 

I thought about this again on Sunday when I talked with a friend. He recently experienced a change of circumstances and is now in a situation where he has to make new friends. He was lamenting that because people tend to socialize within the same age group, making friends was much easier right out of college compared to now when more of his peers either have children or at least are in serious relationships.

 

Given that this friend is not that much older than I am, I consider myself  pretty lucky that I have the friends that I have in Chapel Hill.