(Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland)

I recently read an Economist article on the “Three Habits of Highly Irritating Management Gurus.” It’s a great read even coming from the perspective of someone interested in business academia. I agree with the article’s premise: management gurus tend to oversimplify solutions and act as cheerleaders to the sexiest business of the day. But that is what consumers want. The public often accuse academics of writing dense obscure academic tomes – but that’s often because reality is dense and complicated and representing it on paper isn’t easy. And admittedly, academics are fond of pretentious language.

At the same time, there are some management ideas that are not championed enough. An understated one is the idea of companies selling themselves as “prestigious.” I once attended a recruiting pitch by consulting conglomerate Mckinsey and a lady told us why she chose the firm: “Even my mom knows about Mckinsey…and she has no idea what they do! It is a very prestigious place to work at.”

I think “prestige” is a great invention of American corporations. If you can bill your company as “prestigious” and “selective,” you can get young willing bodies to work incredibly long hours for a discounted wage and still feel good about it. Perhaps the business cultural anthropologist should make a best-selling book out of this.

(Angkor Wat, Cambodia)

Every organization has rites of passage: motions that everyone has to go through in order to reach the upper echelons of an organization. These rites exist whether one is a newly minted investment banker, a consulting grunt, or a toiling academic. However, the activities required by these rites might seem to some to be silly, wasteful or even abusive…but that is how organizations work.

What are some of these rites? Investment bankers talk about how they have to spend years working on dreadfully boring excel jobs bordering on data entry before they can reach the excitement of advising on financial strategies. Consultants are similarly involved in a lot of excel number crunching, despite the sales pitch to the contrary. Academics toil under the tyranny of powerful professors – they are the apprentice and the word of their masters makes all the difference in their research. Even non-profits have rites of passage: a friend at Doctors without Borders (MSF) relate how ex-McKinsey consultants working towards graduate schools often end up doing secretarial work at the organization.

Why do rites of passage exist? Although this process might be about accumulating experience necessary for performing higher level work, I suspect that the rites are simply a means for a community to establish a sense of hierarchy. In entering a community, completing the rites is a process of acquiring legitimacy within the community in order to move upwards. Power is acquired by saying I had been there and done that.

But of course all these rites are different. Saying that it exists for any organization obscures how each of these rites is very much different in its qualitatitive content. If you are a young adventurous youth striking out from college, do you want to take part in these rites for a number of years or strike out on your own?

(Angkor Wat, Cambodia)

Over lunch, I met with friends from the Economics and History graduate PhD programs. I told them some of the readings I did for the two graduate seminars in anthropology I am taking. The readings dealt with sex and anthropologists, and how one author claimed that sex in the field (I use this literally and figuratively) can aid in a more intimate (no pun intended) understanding of the true ambience of the field. Another author questioned whether sex in the field is about inappropriate power relations and power abuse, or about the breakdown of hierarchy and barriers.

Here are excerpts from the paper:

“His hands reach up to remove the camera around my neck, the tape recorder from my shoulder. Then he undresses me, as if willful before him, and there is no fear. His face is smudged with smoke and dirt, as he reaches out to pull me down into the water. Fighting the forest fire for days has not worn him down but, rather, stimulated him in strange and unexpected ways… Suddenly, I hear the helicopter moving overhead. It awakens me only seconds before the alarm blasts from the bedside table.” [Kate Altork – Walking the Fire Line: The Erotic Dimension of the Fieldwork Experience]*

We all agreed that we chose the wrong academic field.

Anyway, I am taking ethnographic research methods because anthropology is something I had little exposure to previously, but I hope to creatively cross-apply some methodologies I pick up in this area to the field of management research – sans eroticism.

*In case you did not get it, the last line indicates that it was a dream. But it was a dream meant to represent the author’s thoughts on her fieldwork studying firefighters.

A friend’s sister was admitted to Penn (Wharton). I gave some thoughts on the education there and thought future readers might find it helpful. Just a caveat: my view is that of one person on the school and different people have different experiences based on their personalities and interests, so you might want to ask other people. I was not involved in Greek Life and I started out in the Huntsman program, but eventually went single degree at Wharton.

My biggest issue with Wharton is that I’m not 100% sure I want to do business, so I’m afraid it would be a bad choice. Then again, I really don’t know what I want to do; there isn’t one subject that stands out as me as an obvious major in an Arts and Sciences school.

If you have the interest and the motivation, you can definitely explore other majors in the College and would not be confined to Wharton. That said, there is peer pressure in Wharton to focus on business/finance/consulting tracks.

Did you and everyone else at Wharton know they wanted to do business and have career goals in mind from the start?

No. Most people don’t and I suspect a lot of people still don’t know what they want to do when they graduate. I would try to explore but again, there is a lot of peer pressure to pursue investment banking/consulting - you start measuring your self-worth by the bank you work for. That said, there might be a similar problem in other Ivy League schools, especially in the economics department.

Also, what were your favorite and least favorite parts of Wharton?

The best: Small faculty-student ratio for the most part, opportunities to get involved in research (since few others are interested) and analytical nature of quite a number of classes. Name recognition and relative ease in getting a job (in banking and consulting)
The worst: Culture of school tends to be geared too much towards getting a job, which I feel detracts from what a college should be.

Did you find courses like Finance and Accounting dry?

Surprisingly, finance was quite interesting. Accounting was not too bad too. Really depends on your interest - I never took much finance/accounting beyond the mandatory classes.

I’ve heard that Wharton is very cutthroat; is that true?

Wharton is competitive but I don’t think the competition is cutthroat. Then again, could be my peer circle of friends. You would find people who study hard just to get a grade, not out of interest, but then again, I believe this could be the case at other schools. If you don’t like group projects, Wharton is a bad place since I know many people who had to cope with terrible project mates and this made their experience at school worse.

What was your concentration in Wharton? Did you double major or minor in other schools at Penn?

I ended up dropping Huntsman program for an individualized single degree studying Business and Development interactions at Wharton

I have been inducted to Beta Gamma Sigma, the honors society for business school student. I wonder how selection is done…

Congratulations! The University of Pennsylvania Chapter of Beta Gamma Sigma would like to acknowledge your outstanding scholastic achievements by inviting you to become a lifetime member of Beta Gamma Sigma, the honor society recognizing business excellence since 1913 which recognizes students in the top 10% of their class. Membership in Beta Gamma Sigma is the highest recognition a business student anywhere in the world can receive in an undergraduate or master’s program at a school accredited by AACSB International – The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business.

It is admissions season and helicopter parents and their wards have descended on Penn’s campus. At the Penn bookstore, I saw one parent and his two probably middle-school daughters fingering the Wharton logo on a sweatshirt. The parent said, “if you go here you get to burn dollar bills.” I am concerned with what parents teach their children these days.

(Havana, Cuba)

It is our pleasure to let you know that your submission to the MIT International Review entitled “Ethical Decision-Making Under Uncertainty” has been selected for inclusion for our Winter 2008/’09 Issue.

Along with two wonderful co-authors at Wharton, I managed to publish another paper. It has been a great week academically and it is nice to have an opportunity to share some of our ideas. The summary is below and the full paper is archived here.

There have been increasing opportunities for investing in North Korea since market reforms in 2002 and European firms have responded with increased interest in the North Korea market. Any business operating in North Korea has to interact with a government that actively and systematically engages in alleged human rights violations. The extensive and systematic violations of human rights in North Korea and paucity of information from North Korea creates a situation which we call ethical uncertainty. Many products or services with dual use have the potential for ethical violations. Companies do not know with certainty whether their product is being misapplied. Thus, companies planning to invest in North Korea need a framework that encourages consideration of the ethical dimensions in terms of such uncertainty. Given this situation, our paper will examine failures of existing approaches under this unique situation, and develop a practical framework based on an appropriate ethical theory that can guide investment decisions and operations in North Korea.

(Seoul, Korea) Blazing my own path…

So it is finally official. I have dropped the Huntsman Program at Penn. Despite the well-meaning effort of friends, faculty and administrators to dissuade me, I completed the path I set out on after returning to Penn in 2007. What I learned from this process is that I should be willing to revisit my educational path to evaluate whether it meets my learning objectives. There is nothing to fear from change except the new opportunities it brings.

After spending summer working in China in 2007, I realized that the program I was in constrained my learning opportunities more than it supported them. While I am grateful to the amazing students and staffs who make up the program, and the support the Huntsman Program has given me, I realized that my interests were best pursued elsewhere. Once this dawned on me, the decision to switch my majors was quick. The takeaway is that inertia is a lousy excuse for sticking to a sub-optimal learning path.

There were friends who cited the prestige of the program as a good reason to stay in it. I think the problem with chasing prestige is that you end up living your life according to what others think is best for you, not what you think is best for yourself. Sticking to Huntsman for such a reason would have meant missing out the unique learning experience I had in structuring one of my majors around solving a healthcare problem.

(Dandong, China) Oh to make more of a difference!

Taking the opportunity to study Korean while I am in Seoul, I realized how nice it is to be able to communicate with someone in a foreign language. This made me regret the wasted opportunity I had in studying Chinese when I was younger. Back then, having never had the opportunity to venture beyond Singapore’s borders, I did not put in the effort into Chinese I should have.

Although I am still fluent in Chinese, having spent two summers working there, I still wish I could be able to handle more technical terms, and express myself more eloquently in the language. When I was working on my research on Harmonious Society and wrote op-eds on its implications for corporate social responsibility, I was able to reach a Western audience and get them to take my ideas seriously. However, I could not have the same impact in China because my Chinese language capacity still lags seriously behind my English language skills.

But I am going to change that in the next two semesters, and I plan to venture back into China next spring to do that. I intend study at Tsinghua University in Beijing after graduating at the end of this year.

(Rome, Italy) Where hence the individual?

Before the semester ended, I was awarded the Wharton Undergraduate Research Award for excellence in research. It was given to five winners nominated by the faculty and I was the only non-senior. What does this mean? I don’t know. Most awards and fellowships are truly strange rituals: they sound truly impressive, but no one outside a select group, or in this case, perhaps just the winners and the faculty, knows about them.

Awards and fellowships validate our sense of self-importance rather than accomplish anything. If there is anything remotely important, it would be in the work I did preceding the award. I researched the impact of a new policy in China on corporate citizenship, drew some conclusions, and used them to try—in what small ways I can—to create positive change in society. Awards say nothing of this process. It simply summarizes the effort, often in ways that crushes the individualism of the effort. Perhaps that is the purpose of awards: they seek people that match an idealized form of excellence – a mold.