Juniorbird.com

I’m old. Officially old. What is it that makes me old? Why, it’s my ability to reminisce, with a twinkle in my eye and a wistful tone, about the good old days when I wrote batch files to run statistical tests on “SPSS”:http://spss.com/spss/family.cfm, which, by the way, ran on the server, not some dinky desktop. Ahh yes, I miss firing up “Kermit”:http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/kermit.html, telnetting into the server (bambi.pomona.edu, I think) running “pico”:http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/usail/external/riceinfo/UNIX12/unix12.html or “vi”:http://thomer.com/vi/vi.html to write a command file instructing SPSS what to do with my data, FTPing the data to the server, running SPSS from the command line (there was no user interface, you’d just type SPSS nomanager inputfile outputfile), hoping there were no errors (and repeating the whole process if there were), and, if the whole megillah worked, waiting 30-45 minutes for the computer center staff to pull the 60-70 green-and-white pages of output for my job off of the large-format dot-matrix printer and drop it in the “names starting with W” cubby.
So yeah it was a little obtuse, as these things go. But I loved SPSS. It could do whatever you needed with as much, or as little, data as you had. It had this user’s manual — oh, that manual! — that was better than any other stats textbook I’d ever seen. You knew, when you used SPSS, you held power in your hands. Or at least you had a non-exclusive connection to power via a 14,400 baud modem line.
We just started Stats. The “prof”:http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~sls/ seems great, but I’m not sure about the statistical package we’re using, “Palisade StatTools”:http://www.palisade.com/html/stattools.asp. Graphs seem to have randomly-labeled axes. “RECODE”:http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wlm/wlmsreco.htm? Feh, use a “PivotTable”:http://www.microsoft.com/BusinessSolutions/excel_pivot_tables_collins.aspx. Sadly, with only about 460 rows of 7 fields of data, and 768 MB of RAM, I managed to run out of memory trying to use a PivotTable to automagically make my data useable. Oh, and the descriptive statistics don’t include the “mode”:http://www.aaamath.com/B/sta418x3.htm. What’s up with that?

Or two weeks, more like — last Monday’s Microeconomics midterm plus yesterday’s Accounting midterm and today’s Strategy final. If you’re keeping track at home, that’s two entire weekends of studying for classes that I’m not sure I really get, plus last night studying for a class that I thought I got real good but maybe I’m not so sure after that final.
Econ wasn’t that bad. I knew I didn’t understand most of what was going on so I kicked my ass studying in a really systematic way:
* Making a list, and then flash cards, of all the formulae described in the chapters in question
* Making outlines out of the parts of the chapters in question that I highlighted
* Doing a few strategic problems and making some graphs
The result? I think I did better than I expected. Not great, but within a standard deviation of the mean.
Accounting was awful. I though I understood it, I’d been giving people advice on it for weeks — good advice too, from what they said — but when I got a copy of last year’s test from the prof, I couldn’t even start to figure out how to do about half of the problems! So I shut myself up for an entire weekend and made ouutlines of every chapter. Then I tried the practice test again; couldn’t start about half of the problems!
So Monday night was pretty stressful, although I managed to keep well short of panic. For a change, I did problems in the book; actually, that worked pretty darned well. After a few hours of that, I was able to begin to approach the practice test. But I was also out of time and had to go to bed. In the morning, I studied the answer key to the practice test, and then took the test itself; not so bad, at the end. I’m not sure how many questions I got right, but I had an idea of how to approach all of them. So, yay partial credit, I hope. Certainly better than I’d hoped.
After Accounting, it was hard to get hyped about Strategy. I’ve been strong in that class so far and didn’t feel worried at all. I read the case, on McDonald’s, and the S&P report on the restaurant industry. I made a five forces model and a value chain for McDonalds. I took notes on the case and reviewed some of the supplemental readings.
And then the test completely threw me for a loop. Multiple choices? Not once during class had we had to make hard, cut-and-dry determinations, so this format was quite a surprise. Other questions were easier to approach but most of them — even the short answers — could have been a full essay. I was fine on all of this section except for one essay, which asked how the four threats to sustainability affected McDonalds. The four threats to whatsit now? I managed to remember two of the threats (slack, hold-up), and made up two more, one of which was half right (the answer is “imitators” and “substitutes”). But I think I did OK in the end.
I’m trying not to worry; you know my new watchword: “within one standard deviation of the mean.”

One of the best uses of my time this year was the “Graduate Marketing Association’s”:http://www.marshall.usc.edu/clubs/GMA.cfm?doc_id=3557 “Marketing Institute”:http://www.marshall.usc.edu/clubs/GMA.cfm?doc_id=3596. I’ll admit, I was pretty skeptical at first; the GMA has a reputation for being very “CPG-oriented”:http://business.acronymfinder.com/af-query.asp?string=exact&acronym=cpg, and I’ve publicly declaimed my tech marketing orientation. After a week of midterms and Strategy projects, the 5:45 wakeup for six hours of presentations didn’t seem like the most fun. Happily I was proven quite wrong!
There were a few particularly good speakers, one of whom fortunately presented first. “Greg Pollack”:http://www.marshall.usc.edu/media/mag_s_04/profile_pollack.pdf from “PBM Marketing”:http://pbmmarketing.com/index2.html. In my first job, at “Pacific Visions”:http://marmillion.com, we built strategic partnerships between government and non-profits; PBM marketing does the same for commercial entities. It was fun to think that something I understood could be applied in more ways then I’d known.
But that wasn’t the speaker that made the most impact on me. “Rusty Ortiz”:http://www.nestleusa.com/pressRoom/pressReleases/pressRelease.asp?id=200491154645208111343 from Nestle really blew me away. He was a personable man himself, but what was important was the story he told; for the first time, brand management and CPG sounded like a good idea.
In all of my jobs since PVC, I’ve been a bit dissatisfied that we in marketing were running to catch up with everybody else in their departments. We couldn’t drive what happened; we could only follow. But, in CPG, marketing is the driver. Rusty told fascinating stories of moving brands forward with thoughtful consideration, of being in the driver’s seat, of being able to look into the consumer and act on what’s out there.
An earlier speaker, Nancy Zwiers of “Funosophy”:http://www.funosophy.com/, made a very cogent distinction between marketing-driven companies and sales-driven companies. Sales-driven companies look for marketing to change sales numbers; marketing-driven companies use marketing as a lens through which to see the world, and marketing drives planning and sales. What marketing wouldn’t want to work in a marketing-driven company? Nestle — and Dial, for which Rusty had earlier worked — seemed just that kind of a place.
A few speakers after Rusty came Ned Ward from Mattel. Now, when a toy designer gets up to speak you know you’re going to have a good time, and Ned didn’t disappoint. Funny, with great stories, Ned again showed the value of working at a marketing-driven company.
There were other speakers, and they were all good; but Rusty and Ned, and, to a lesser extent, Nancy, turned me around completely on CPG. I’ll certainkly be seriously considering a CPG internship for the summer, probably more seriously than an internship in tech marketing. Yes, those were six well-spent hours.

One of the most famous accounting frauds ever perpetrated in the US is the Salad Oil Caper, which, surprisingly enough, has nothing to do with small, green berries. The story behind the caper is this: back in the ’60s, an Italian American-owned firm in Chicago looked to the then-well respected accountancy of Arthur Andersen to value and underwrite bonds that would be issued, backed by the 1.8 billion pounds of salad oil posessed by this firm. The Andersen auditors dropped by the storage facilities to confirm that the firm did, in fact, have said 1.8 billion pounds of salad oil. These auditors, in crisp white shirts and pressed suits, didn’t want to get covered with salad oil, so they just climbed a ladder to the top of the giant vats of salad oil, opened a hatch, stuck their fingers in, and determined that yes, Virginia, there was salad oil in there. The gigantic bond issue was approved and underwritten, and the bonds (certified to be particularly low-risk) were extensively purchased by widows and orphans. Whereupon it was discovered that the gigantic vats of salad oil were actually filled with water, on top of which the oil floated; and, as the Andersen auditor had traveled from one vat to the next, a complicated system of pipes had pumped a relatively small amount of oil from one vat to the next. The bonds were worthless, people were pushed into penury, and the world learned a lesson about asset valuation!
Another famous accounting fraud was carried out by a hard disk drive maker in the lat ’80s. The entire industry had fallen on hard times and one manufacturer after another was losing money. One company was taken over by the VC firm that had financed it and a new, whip-cracking boss was put in charge. This boss became famous for having big all-hands meetings at which individuals were singled out, asked about their sales performance relative to their targets, and, if they fell short, fired on the spot. This created a climate of fear, so the CFO hatched a devious plan. Sales staff had put up good numbers, but production was lagging; already-made sales would be lost because the hard drives to fulfill those sales hadn’t been made yet. But if the sales were lost, then people, probably including the CFO, would be fired! Shipments absoloutely had to be made to the purcharsers in the current year. The solution: the CFO drove to the hardware store, bought a pallet of bricks (the red kind, that you use to make buildings — about the same size and weight as a hard drive, at the time), and brought them down to shipping. Into each hard drive box went a bridk and a certificate that entitled the bearer to redeem the brick for a hard drive, when one was available. The brick-filled boxes were shipped, and the revenue from sales duly booked. The company made its target, and nobody was fired, of course until all the customers noticed that they had bricks and not hard drives and then people went to prison.
It’s all true. Every word. I swear.