The AIM Blogger

The theme these days is the glaring difference in the MBA life I'm leading today compared to last year. The best example is today, Friday. But what's with Fridays, anyway? One year ago, Friday was notorious for being the day our class had to accomplish our individual Written Analysis of Cases (WACs). It was a test in a lot respects, all right. WACs tested your stamina, energy, your decision-making and your drive to accomplish something. The approach was like a mission Jim Phelps would get in Mission: Impossible -- You had 15 hours to write a paper or else you get a zilch, as simple as that. It also meant that your social life was virtually suspended in limbo. For our electives term that started more than two months ago, Fridays are now designated as our "MRR Day," or a free day for us to do things related to our Management Research Report -- and that usually meant doing research on various data sources, going to our proponents' offices to do interviews...

It seems the blogging tradition in AIM continue with the new MBA guys. (Yey!) There are a couple of blogs from the Freshies that focused on their respective experiences with the Pre-MBA so far and they are interesting reads. The first one is " Doodles in Words ":   Here's a choice quip from the blog: As we get closer to the real stuff, our anxieties are "geometrically" increasing. After barely surviving almost two weeks in the program, I am beginning to feel my body failing on me. And they say it's going to get harder. Sigh. I think I need to vomit. Sounds familiar ? :P The next blog is " The Missing Piece ":      And here's an excerpt from Yuva's blog: The number of credits and debits just drives me crazy . Accounting or “Language of Business” as it is called, is something that us driven some of us in the class to really think again on whether MBA is the right thing for us . I am not very good at it and will never will be but like ...

With the Web becoming one big glop of information, especially with bits and pieces coming from the users, business pundits have observed that personal attention has become one scarce resource. And whenever there is a scarce resource, economic theories apply. Thus the term “ Attention Economy ” was coined. It may come to a surprise that as early as the 1970’s, experts have observed the deluge of information from various sources have outpaced the span of human attention. Herbert Simon wrote about this phenomenon in a 1971 journal from John Hopkins University, and was followed up by Michael Goldhaber in 1997 during the advent of the Internet in his article The Attention Economy and the Net . The blogosphere has also taken notice of the Attention Economy . Web 2.0 has undoubtedly accelerated the pace of information creation and codification in the last half decade and if was hard to get people’s attention then, it surely is harder now, even with new ways of interrupting and distractin...

I'm helping out one my classmates, Julie Chua, who is doing her MRR with John Clements Consultants, Inc . She's helping promote the upcoming Talent Management Conference 2008 at the Quezon Ballroom of the Makati Shangri-La on September 4-5, 2008. The event is organized by John Clements in partnership with Harvard Business Publishing . The event is described as "A two-day groundbreaking conference aims to serve as a venue for local and multinational HR practitioners to share insights into the significance of talent management in building sustainable advantage in competitive marketplaces."

  I was reading through my old posts and I realized how much different my situation is now, compared to eight months ago. For the last two weeks, I've only been having one to two classes a day, plus the customary Friday break for the Management Research Report (MRR). How did that happen? Well, my classes in Self-Mastery, Arts& Spirituality (SMARTS), Creative Marketing & Selling (CMS) and Customer Experience Management (CEM) are all done. Remember how screwed up I was ? Sheesh, that seemeed like a long time ago. Seniors really have it easier. :) I guess if anybody is looking for more "excitement," look at the blogs of the freshmen. :P

August 21, 2008 will come down in AIM history as the day the very first AIM Community Poker Championship (ACPC) event was held. The tournament was held at the Bancom Room at the Asian Institute of Management . The Texas Hold 'Em games started off with 37 players on five tables. The winners of each table then advanced in the finals game where the top three finishers would end up with the prizes. Games started at around 7pm and the players and spectators were treated to nice finger food and pizza, plus soda and beer, with the beer courtesy of Prof. Ricky Lim . Very few alumni came (only Carica president Ramon Tan and my former roommate El Lampa attended), but there were lots of non-SUPR students who came, including folks from the new batch. (That's how you start 'em right :P) The energy at the Bancom room was very high and electric during the games as it had everything about competition-- jubilation from calling bluffs, frustration from not getting the card you're ...

Ah, the Pre-MBA ... The newest batch of 16-month MBA students started their Pre-MBA Program yesterday and they are having manageable dosages of Languange of Business (LOB), Economics and Quantitative Analysis (QA). If you recall last year, we were bombarded with Prof. Larry Tan 's LOB classes all the way. :) I volunteered to play big brother to the new batch (yeah, we're the Seniors now!) and give them a couple of drills in QA. I chose this subject because, obviously, I was utterly so-so in LOB and Economics. I was quite excited to do the tutorial because there are lots of new people to meet and I know a few of them, either personally or via emails or comments because of my blog. The new group is bigger than our class, I hear they are around 130 strong. (Our batch is only 95) A few classmates of mine gave me moral support at the beginning of the session (Thank you Frank, Diamond, Michelle, Mark Chan, and Johnson!) I started the session with a simple grouped frequency pr...