39 Years Ago Today

Most people know about Apollo 11, the first moon landing by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. I remember the Apollo space era as a young boy and remember Apollo 11, as well as the drama of Apollo 13. But preceding these missions was Apollo 8, which may have been even a bigger milestone.

After years of testing the limits of space within earth’s orbit, Apollo 8 was the first manned spaceship to actually travel to the moon and inject itself into lunar orbit. With the moon 250,000 miles away, such a mission took an immense amount of planning. Getting to the vicinity of the moon was relatively simple, but getting the spacecraft into lunar orbit, and more importantly to get back out, was a marvel of ingenuity and planning. In reality, the spaceship was programmed to do much of this work.

Thirty-nine years ago today, the crew of Apollo 8 (Borman, Lovell, and Anders) successfully injected themselves into lunar orbit. For perhaps the biggest television audience ever, the crew reported their observations (orbiting only 60 miles from the surface of the moon). The crew had a special Christmas message for that audience:

In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth; and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of the God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good.
And God divided the light from the darkness.
And God called the light Day,a nd the darkness He called Night.
And the evening and the morning were the first day . . .
And God called the firmament Heaven.
And the evening and the morning were the second day.
And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering together of the waters called He seas.
And God saw that it was good.

Interestingly, the crew of Apollo 8 learned more about the earth by visiting the moon. The most magnificent image was when the Earth rose from the horizon of the gray, dark moon (pictured at the top). And that is how 1968 went on Christmas Eve. One person sent their congratulations to the homeward bound astronauts, saying “Thank you Apollo 8. You saved 1968." After a turbulent year of assassinations, riots, and war, the astronauts of Apollo 8 were named Time Magazine's Men of Year.

I hope everyone will appreciate and cherish this 2007 Christmas season.

Sorry, I took an extra week of "recovery"; thus, the lateness of this post.

One of the nice things about being both a professor and a student is that after each semester you can start anew again. We get to clean the decks and prepare to start a new semester. Not all jobs are that way.

Coming out of college in the early 1980s I worked as an accountant for a grain company. In that job we had to "run the books" monthly, creating and reconciling a number of statements, including the profit and loss. While this process would clean out many issues, many others remained for the next month. Rarely, was there a time of starting anew, as legacy problems impacted new months and new projects. Now every year the auditors showed up and evenutally there would be decisions made on write-offs that did leave some feeling of starting somewhat fresh.

But not like teaching. I will be spending the next few weeks reflecting on what was done this past semester and since I will likely teach these courses again, starting fresh with new students and some ideas on how to improve.

And for the next several weeks, I will have more time to explore ideas and readings related to management, business, history, etc. I will try in my posts over this time period to share the more interesting parts of this study with you.

The Dark Side of the Moon

Last weekend Grace Irwin and our Executive Fellows staff hosted a reception for our Exec Fellows students with a special guest (pictured to the right with Grace and her son).

Just a quick update now that November is past -- my two daughters participating in NanoWrimo met their goals: Rachel logged 15, 559 words and Taylor logged approximately 65,000. My other daughter penned an essay on chocolate, claiming its calming, healthy effects. Yeah right (but she did have some nice support).

And finally, final assignments are due tonight in one class and due Thursday in another. So starting around Thursday I will be hunkering down to some serious grading and must come up for air by the following Tuesday. As the Apollo astronauts would say, at that time I will be returning from the dark side of the moon, ready to make my next blog entry.

Senior Survival Skills

Ideally, all your monthly debt, including your mortgage, should amount to no more than how much your gross income? What is a W-4? Two people save money in a tax-deferred Individual Retirement Account that earns 8% annually. Person A invests $3,000 a year from age 20 to 29, but then never saves another penny. Person B starts investing $3,000 a year at age 30 and saves that same amount annually for the rest of his life. Who has more money in the account at age 65?

These are questions I didn’t think much about as a college student, but were raised at an event put on for Rockhurst seniors who are close to getting that first real job.

Interestingly, this event—“Senior Survival Skills”—was hosted by Rockhurst business students. More specifically, it was planned and run by Delta Sigma Pi and the Dean’s Student Advisory Board. With the help of moderator Professor Turner White, the students were able to bring in three senior managers from EMBARQ, Creative Planning, Inc., and Northwestern Mutual to talk about such things as health insurance, retirement plans, budgeting, and taxes; things new workers must make decisions about upon entering the workforce.

In case you were wondering, the answers to the questions leading this post: 36%, the form you fill out to tell your employer how much tax to withhold from your paycheck, and Person A. Unfortunately I am more like person B -- so I drive inexpensive cars.

Espanõl

A few years ago my teenage daughter was spending Wednesday nights at church teaching in the ESL class -- made up primarily of Spanish speaking adults wanting to learn English. I encouraged her with the one Spanish word I knew: Espanol. She grew to enjoy the experience (which she did for over two years) because of how nice and sincerely grateful the people were. And I was proud that she willingly made that choice at the expense of time with her friends.

Yesterday, I was able to attend a capstone presentation by one of my students, Allison Rank. She is a business major also majoring in Spanish. The picture included here is Allison with some of the children she has spent time with on her three visits to Mexico. I should probably tell you more about these boys pictured and the experience (life changing, perhaps) Allison had because it was part of her presentation. The problem for me was that she presented it completely in Spanish!

This is the first Spanish capstone I have attended and I enjoyed it immensely (authentic food provided). I better understand why we have business majors who also major in foreign language. For Allison it started with her visit to Mexico while she was a student here at Rockhurst. I suspect that she learned most of her Spanish while in Mexico. It further makes me aware of the opportunities Rockhurst students have across departments here on campus.

The one thing I could understand from her presentation is that Carlos Slim, a Mexican businessman, has a personal net worth of $59 Billion. Certainly, nothing slim about that!

Phoenix, Arizona

I am writing from the Phoenix airport, having spent the week here. At right is a picture of where I stayed -- the Hotel San Carlos. As you might imagine, this hotel has a long history -- built from what started as Phoenix's first school in 1874. By the way Arizona is the 48th state, getting statehood not until 1912.

Having stayed in this old hotel got me thinking about the commercial appeal of going retro. This hotel called itself a boutique hotel (like, for example, the Raphael in the Plaza), but it was mostly a very old buidling with some of the charm (and inconvenience) of an old style hotel experience. Included were paper thin walls, small rooms, and unregulated water temperatures for the shower. Still, it had more charm than the what the Hyatt (where our event was held) down the street that cost twice as much and had much better amenities.

While the hotel was old and historic, Retro is big business. Converse and adidas sell retro shoes going back to the 60's and 70's -- I can remember wearing the classic cavass Converse shoes when I was kid, which only shows my age. I saw today a retro car made by Nissan in the 1990s --a very old Italian model called the Figaro. Of course many styles are retro. Perhaps that completes my theme here as retro is the regeneration of extinct or dead things, which describes the Phoenix, the city I write from.

Keeping Up

It is officially the "grind" part of the semester -- and not just for students. At this point, faculty are in full teacher mode of preparing courses, grading papers, meeting with students, preparing tests, etc. and also serving on committees (my afternoon was spent doing meetings).

But teaching college is still a great job if you can get it -- and not just because you having light summers. One of the fortunate things for me is to be able to work with such great colleagues. Even in this busy time of the year, I have managed to add to my reading list just through informal interactions with these colleagues. Tonight I am reading The Future of Management recommended by management professor Randy Schwering (and independently later by John Meyer). Professor Turner White keeps me well supplied with pertinent readings from the New York Times (a source I am reluctant to browse), New Yorker and other periodicals outside the Wall Street Journal. Myles Gartland earlier this semester added to my reading with Davenport's book on Competing on Analytics. Yesterday, Professor Perry, after a nice discussion whether work is personal, pitched a book simply titled Flow (good luck spelling the author's last name). I had to give it back to him -- I must wait until finals to work off my reading backlog. Today, I had a 10-minute chat with professor Tocco on our favorite history books related to WWII-- some of his like the biography of Truman must also get in line.

College students have lots of reading to do, too . . . I just hope they have half as much fun learning from those things they must read and find ways to read things they choose.

Update from last post: My NaNoWrimo daughters' work to date:
Taylor: 16,000 + words (target 50,000 +)
Rachel: 4,425 words (target 15,000 words)

NaNoWriMo

Our Rockhurst students do a variety of tasks and activities over their four (or so) years. One thing they do a lot of is writing . . . more than they would certainly choose to do on their own. For my job I have to write as well. Today I spent time with my colleage Dr. Tocco working on a case study we are co-authoring. This document is about 7,500 words as we are working on at least or third revision. While I enjoy getting such things completed and published, the work of revising is quite tedious.

This leads me to the month of November, which starts in a couple of hours. November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). People from all over the country sign up on the website, pledging to write a 50,000 + word novel -- in 30 days. This is like running a marathon. I know about this not because I am writing a novel (nor do I have any kind of time or talent to do so) but because my oldest daughter is. For the last few weeks she has been very busy preparing for the event by developing character profiles, doing research (her story is historical), and plotting (read her blog to find out about her novel). She has been working with her younger sister on writing and this sister is signed up for the junior NaNaWrimo -- pledged to write 15,000 words.

What's interesting to me is that both these daughter participants are looking forward to this writing journey; both are doing this in addition to their regular school tasks, household chores, etc. It doesn't count for extra credit. I suspect many of the other participants are the same. Yes, these are marathoners . . . may you all finish the race!

The Gould Award

Often--too often, perhaps--student work has an audience of just the teacher. Many of my colleagues, however, look for ways to stretch students with bigger audiences. This past week, my colleage Dr. Brian Fitzpatrick attended the 2007 Robert L. Gould annual meeting to watch a former student accept the award for the top paper for the year. This competition has been going 16 years and involves three schools--Northeastern, University of Denver, and Rockhurst.

This year's winner--the second year in a row from Rockhurst--is Katie Hull. Each fall Dr. Fitzpatrick assigns the comprehensive research report for his Investments class; Katie was a student last fall, writing on the topic of how to make mutual fund fee reporting more transparent. Currently, Katie is in her first year of law school at Vanderbilt University.

Besides receiving a trip to Washington, D.C. to be recognized for the award, she received $1,000 -- something that should come in handy during law school. She majored in Finance/Economics and also got degrees in Spanish and Political Science. And if you notice her holding office years down the road--she has that as a goal--then remember you saw it here first.

Working Part III

Just to finish my thread on why people work . . . last post I made the easy claim that they love the high of performing or doing the work. Duh! But my lovely wife (an expert in most thing involving human nature) asked a better question -- why do so many people choose a vocation they do not love?

One answer could be that there are lots of bad jobs out there, or that there just aren't enough good ones available. True enough, though this can be fixed in many cases by better management (the one thing I can assert over my wife), as too many managers prefer to give people little jobs or they don't do enough to create a winning atmosphere (everyone likes to work for a winner).

My wife or my oldest daughter (both can claim it) had a better answer to the question, saying that too often people just never figure out their calling. College graduates should have the most leverage to follow their calling so that they can do that which they love and do well. My only advice college students: Don't count being a good student a calling. In fact, (and as a teacher I love good students) I often feel students whose primary focus is simply making good grades can handicap themselves from actually pursing their . . . calling.

It is not my idea of even a good job, but my wife's cousin (see earlier post on Allison Briner), sans college degree, is doing something she loves and is good at. And I am very happy for her because of that. My hope for my students at Rockhurst is no different.

Working Part II

The cast of a travelling Broadway play perform 5-6 days a week. Evidently, the cast and crew call their Saturday performance the hump--the one where they can see the end in sight. Only to begin again the next week. (Those 9-5 grinders reach the hump on Wednesday as we look forward to a weekend.) I don't know the pay, but suspect the business model for these events doesn't allow for big money (lot's of overhead in these productions).

Yet, to get these jobs is against the odds of stiff competition. Obviously, they do this because they love the work. While I don't envy the schedule of those cast members travelling the continent to perform (over and over again) Mamma Mia! I do respect that they are likely doing something they love to do. People will sacrifice much in order to do those things they love to do. In talent industries such as entertainment the high is not easily replaced -- and simply making money will not have a long-lasting impact. The motivation to pursue an acting career is intrinsic.

So students, I hope you are pursuing vocational love not just money as you think beyond your degree . . .

Mamma Mia and Working Part I

I am not an avid arts person – just not something that usually gets on my schedule or in my budget with 4 children. Last night, however, my wife and I made the performance, Mamma Mia, playing at the Music Hall (and just a couple blocks from the debut performance at the new Sprint Center). Actually, we were attending because Allison Briner was one of the performers for the touring company—she is my wife’s cousin. It was a family gathering as her mother and some other family members also attended.

Well, the play exceeded my expectations—both Allison’s performance and overall entertainment value of the event. Mamma Mia reprises all the top songs from an old Swedish pop group name ABBA (evidently they have sold more music all time than everyone except Elvis and someone else). Thanks to Allison for getting us to something we ordinarily wouldn’t do.

Visiting with Allison and seeing the performance got me to thinking about why people do the things they do. Allison has been doing this show for 6 months, touring all over the nation. Her Kansas City week was a typical one – travel on Monday and perform from Tuesday through Sunday (including matinees on Saturday and Sunday). Next week, her Broadway Across America show travels to Norfolk, Virginia, followed the next week by Melbourne, Florida. In fact, the show doesn’t take a break until after the December 1st performance in Boston (not a long one as they start back up the day after Christmas in Ottawa, Canada). In addition to the schedule, these performers—especially this rollicking show—have an exhausting job of singing, dancing, and costume changing. This kind of schedule may sound like fun at 22, but for forty-somethings (which a number of the starring roles were) this simply sounds grueling. So it got me thinking about “working for a living” . . . which will be Part II of this thread.

Community Talent

One of the nice things about working in an urban university is the rich business community it lives in. And for Rockhurst, this has helped it create and nurture a number of alumni and friends that provide a rich resource of talent for our students and faculty to draw from. For instance, last week we two such people on our campus speaking to student groups.

Mary Pat McCarthy, Vice Chairman for KPMG, spoke to over 100 students and faculty on Oct. 3rd. She spoke primarily about leadership and ethics, but she also shared her stories about managing a career. In addition to being an accomplished businessperson in her field, she is author of several books (you'll find them in Amazon.com) and has a Jesuit background (she and much of her family attended Creighton University). Many of my day students attended the event and one student reflected how helpful it was to hear someone give their real life struggles with delegating work and trusting others--seems that many good students tend to like to be controlling, something good managers must give up. This event, sponsored by our Center for Ethics and Leadership, was the first in a series . . . we have another speaker coming in November as part of this series.

Also last week, a Rockhurst MBA alum, Ronald Rittenmeyer, spoke to our executive fellows class. Mr. Rittenmeyer is CEO of EDS, an international IT solutions company founded by Ross Perot. You can read Mr. Rittenmeyer's bio here. I missd his Friday morning presentation, but it is not uncommon for our students at all levels (and faculty) to have access to the alumni and community talent right here in K.C.

New Students from all over

We are in the busy grind of the semester, which means lots of things going on. Among them this week was our Freshmen in Business luncheon on Tuesday. I guess we have done this for a few years now but this was the first one I was able to attend. Good food, but especially good company as I got to speak with several freshmen considering business as a major.

The students I talked with came from all over the region -- from Cape Girardeau, St. Louis, Nebraska, and Manhattan (where I believe one of the young men pictured here is from).

I appreciate our faculty, staff, and student facilitators who organize this event and lead the 1-hour course called Freshmen in Business. In this course, students get the opportunity to meet many of our faculty in accounting, international business, finance, and economics -- in addition to meeting faculty at this event. Thus, new students don't have to wait a year or two before knowing something about their major.

The Chevette

Following up on my prior post, it turns out the Chevette was not an Edsel -- exactly. While it was the top selling American small car in 1979 and 1980, it is described as a "functional and inexpensive" alternative to the flood of Japanese imports. It was made with old technology (e.g., rear wheel drive) and did not age very well. Not a real image-conscious vehicle. Forgive my surface level research here (Wikipedia) . . . perhaps others know more with better research.

Today in church our pastor delivered another strong sermon, this time beseeching us to be more generous and humble. (Of course I can’t report that I am humble as doing so would prove my assertion false, a catch-22 first reported by Ben Franklin in his autobiography.) Anyway before evoking the passage of it being “easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man . . .” our pastor recounted his having owned a Chevrolet Chevette in his days as a seminary student.

His story about his Chevette was quite good as he described the Chevette model as precisely opposite a Corvette in terms of performance and design. The one redeeming quality of his chug-a-lug Chevette was that it was cheap. When he became a pastor and received a real paycheck he was able to upgrade to a better vehicle. The point of his story was admitting, now the proud owner of a Ford Taurus, looking down (ever so unnoticed to anyone else) on any Chevette pulling up next to him.

I would like to say the reason for posting this bit is it serves an analogous lesson to our student body; the duty of being educated is to not look down on others but to exhalt them. And be humbled by the perfect wisdom of God. Actually, this is a good reason. But my curiosity this morning upon hearing the story was more worldly: Was the Chevy Chevette really that bad? I know General Motors has been poorly run for quite some time now, but was Chevette the GM version of the Edsel? Most of our Rockhurst students are too young to remember the Chevette, but I’m not. It is worth doing a little research . . .

Welcome

For the inaugural post to this blog, I am writing from the Hays, Kansas airport. Actually (and my wife would disapprovingly agree) this is an appropriate place to start given I am spending more time in airports these days. This morning, with my management colleague Turner White, I presented a paper to an audience of business professors from all over the country.

I am usually reluctant to make these trips—it has costs, not the least of which was miss my morning Principles of Management class. But I also get to meet some interesting people in my field of management and business. For example, we got to hear from Matt DeFeo, a marketing V.P. for Techtronic Industries. Though Mr. DeFeo was an excellent and engaging speaker on the topic of leadership, the interesting thing was learning about his company, Techtronic. Did you know that this company makes the Swiffer (another company owns the brand), including the new hit the electronic Swiffer? They also own brands like Hoover, Ryobi, and Dirt Devil. They make other tools that are branded by other companies – tools like Craftsman and Rigid. Techtronics is one of those companies that makes a lot of things that nobody knows about. I love learning about companies and how they find ways to create value for their stakeholders – customers and employees.

I enjoy not only learning about companies but learning the people part, which is management (and leadership). In fact, learning and management have a symbiotic relationship . . . this blog will explore some of my reflections and observations about management, teaching, and learning as experienced here at Rockhurst. I am thankful for the opportunity . . .