My essays for getting into an Ivy League business school in 23 days

Here are my Columbia Business School application essays, to complete the series on getting into business school in 23 days. I edited them slightly, mainly to take out personal details. In the optional essay 5, I can see I was blatantly name-dropping Columbia Business School Professors and my experience at the school. I think I could have used more subtlety. My graduate school stipend -- what I lived on in Manhattan for about four years -- surprises me to this day. I think the number was accurate, but wonder if the first number might have been a 2 instead of…

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My background for getting into an Ivy League business school in 23 days

Yesterday I posted about the process I stumbled into for getting into an Ivy League business school in 23 days. How to read this post Today I'll talk about the credentials that made it possible. But please recognize, the point of these posts is not merely to show you how to get into business school, but to show you that you can combine whatever you have in your past into something bigger than you expect. You have to be aware of the possibilities and ready to act on them. If you are insecure and want to justify why can't succeed,…

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I started at an Ivy League business school 23 days after deciding to apply. Here’s how.

On December 10, 2004 I decided to apply to business school. I had written no essays, taken no GMAT, reviewed no school's web site or application process, and asked no one for a recommendation. On January 2, 2005, 23 days later, I began orientation at Columbia Business School (ranked #5 by Forbes, Economist, and Financial Times). I got my MBA the following May, less than eighteen months from deciding to apply. Prep schools (such as Manhattan GMAT and Kaplan) recommend starting the application process eighteen months before starting classes. I completed my entire application and degree in less time than…

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More on becoming a superstar

I wanted to comment on a quote in yesterday's post about becoming a superstar that illustrates an aspect important for the aspiring star -- you. And, again, superstardom can mean breakout success in any area -- starting a company, making CEO, being a superstar boyfriend, girlfriend, or spouse, etc. A musician I quoted yesterday commented that American Idol's shooting-the-moon style isn't really about music. It's about all the bad aspects of the music business – the arrogance of commerce, this sense of 'I know what will make this person a star; artists themselves don't know.' I've only seen a few…

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How to become a superstar

This post is about breakout success in any area -- starting a company, making CEO, being a superstar boyfriend, girlfriend, or spouse, etc -- but I'll put it in the language of entertainment superstardom. I'll leave translating it to the language of the field you want to succeed in as an exercise. But I guarantee it applies. Superstars make it look so easy. They dress how they want, say what they want, and do what they want and the world loves them for it. Everyone else has to think about what they say and do all the time -- and…

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Facebook’s woes and what it could have done instead

If you know me, you'd expect Facebook's woes to mean the problems Facebook inflicts on its users who haven't left it yet. After all, leaving Facebook is easy and fun. Yes, they're reaching a billion users, but I'm no longer one of them and once you leave the site seems weird, like why would you do business with such a creepy company. From the New York Times, Facebook Shares Plummet in an Earnings Letdown: "Unhappy with Facebook’s first financial report as a public company Thursday, investors fled the stock in droves..." Most of you probably expect the drop resulted from…

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What works in X web page mind map

Following up a comment on my post on the What Works in X web page genius idea, I created a mind map as a rough outline for the site to illustrate it better. It's only a rough outline, but I think a good start. Copying from my response to the reader's comment I envision people at What Works in X sharing anecdotes of things they’ve done at a higher level, like how they got hired by doing something different or got into North Korea or things like that... available in any area. Of course, I put the idea up for…

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Another genius business idea: the “What Works in X” web page

Following up on yesterdays' genius business idea for a book series of successful solved problems in many fields, today let's look at a web page doing something similar. Instead of making it just like a book, let's take advantage of the web's interactivity and let users create content. It's based on the principles of the Art of What Works (the book I mentioned the other day) The product A web site of user-written anecdotes of successful things they did, categorized by field -- eventually, the global repository of solved problems in every field, free for anyone to access or contribute…

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Another genius business idea: the “What Works in X” book series

For the first genius business idea (the series I mentioned a couple days ago) I propose a book series based on the principles of the Art of What Works (the book I mentioned yesterday). The product A series of books like the "for dummies" and "for complete idiot" series, all with the same dimensions, cover design and color scheme, tone, writing style, etc called "What works inX", like "What Works in Selling Your House", "What Works in Nursing", "What Works in Teaching High School", or "What Works in Starting Your Own Restaurant." Each book contains anecdotes of people achieving success…

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The Art of What Works

One of Columbia Business School's most popular courses in recent years has been in strategy, called Napoleon's Glance, named after a book by the instructor, Bill Duggan. Former students I've talked to rave about it. I was fortunate to do an independent study with him before his course exploded in popularity. Now it's so successful I doubt he could devote that kind of attention to a single student. Despite the course's immense popularity at one of the world's great business schools, I was more influenced by his book The Art of What Works. This excerpt from the back cover gets…

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Difficult lessons in leadership

You learn leadership through experience. I've had occasion to recall some of the most challenging and educational experiences of my development. I'm not proud of them. I wish they had never happened. But they formed me as much as anything. The painful experiences I co-founded Submedia in the late 90s. By the early 2000s we had nearly run out of money and were having trouble paying our debts. My PhD in physics, however useful for some things, hadn't prepared me for running a business. Neither did a childhood with little business training. Loneliness I don't know how my best attempts…

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A brief history of Understanding North Korea: Demystifying the World’s Most Misunderstood Country

I wrote the following on Hacker News and thought it fit here. Last week I self-published my first book. My visit to North Korea last year amazed me at how much we base our impressions of North Korea on pre-conceived notions. I already blogged daily, but the experience affected me so much I started posting twice daily, one post on North Korea. Then Kim Jong Il died and tons of articles came out on North Korea, many or most had the same pre-conceived notions or assigned credit to the leaders that I thought were properties of the system, making understanding…

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Understanding Kim Jong Il from a systems perspective, and what to do now

Reading the spate of articles on Kim Jong Il and North Korea, I've seen what look from my perspective misinterpretations. Reporters repeatedly succumb to ascribing to the leader what I consider properties of the system. I think they adopt a great-man model that says if something is working, someone must be making it happen. With only Kim Jong Il or Kim Il Sung around, it must be them. Misallocating causes to events leads to ineffective or counterproductive strategies to act on them. I'll illustrate with two New Yorker articles, not because they misallocate most, but because they do least. In…

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Audio interview: sales lessons from a great failure

Spectacular failures teach us our most valuable lessons. In this interview, I talk about my first, and most painful, sales failure growth experience. I wanted to crawl under a rock and die, but the meeting crept on. Afterward I didn't want to continue in business, let alone do any sales. The word I was looking for at 2:38 was condescension, by the way. My business partner's perspective -- that you win some and you lose some; we didn't win this one but the next would be better -- changed my life for the better as one of the major steps…

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Leaders take responsibility

One last behavioral trend to round out a few recent posts on behaviors that correlate with importance. The others were on leaders having the least stuff, being the least hurried, and the most common route to becoming CEO. People know this one, though they don't always act consistently with it. Look throughout an organization. The higher you move in the organization chart, the more responsibility people have. Having responsibility because of your position isn't the same as choosing to take responsibility. But people who choose to take responsibility become more important in their communities. Likewise, people who shirk responsibility lose…

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The most common route to CEO

"What is the best route to become CEO of a corporation?" For people driven to reach the top it's a common question. A classmate asked it of Ralph Biggadike, professor of Top Management Processes, which, when I was at Columbia Business School, was the class in highest demand. Ralph is an excellent teacher, as knowledgeable about top management as you'd expect one of the top professors at one of the top business schools to be. I expect most of the students in the class were driven to reach the tops of their planned professions. As I recall, most of the…

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The CEO carries the least

Important people do things differently than unimportant people -- that is, behavior correlates with importance. If you want people to consider you more important -- to trust and defer to you -- you should pick up on how behavior correlates with importance. And with unimportance if you want to avoid being lumped in with unimportant people. The more important you are, the less you carry. The following corporate examples are simplified to communicate easily, but see how they resonate with your experience. An engineer who is easily replaced often carries tons of stuff -- a big bag, sometimes so full…

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Perfection in leadership and how to improve

Leadership does not require perfection -- far from it. Effective leaders don't have to be strong in many leadership skills at all. Effective leadership emerges more from knowing your strengths and weaknesses than on having many strengths. Speed and strength are valuable to any position in football, but a quarterback doesn't need strength like a lineman. And a lineman doesn't need to be as fast as a running back. A quarterback trying to be as strong as a lineman is wasting his time and hurting his team. Using Columbia Business School's breakdown of leadership skills into the six categories, for…

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