It is August After All
Today is August 26th. I rarely get so specific with my story timing because in a perfect world (for me), I get 3-4 stories out ahead of myself and can coast for a few days with blog stories filed and set up for timed release. Since you will read this story tomorrow, August 27th, you now know that I am only just one day ahead of the maw of the blog beast. I am sitting here in my office looking out over another sunny day on the hillside that promises to be in the low 90s, and except for a slightly smoggy mist on the horizon, mostly a cloud-free blue sky. In almost everything I have done this week I have found myself needing to remind myself that people are not getting back to me as quickly as I would like (we all recognize that I am Mr. Impatient in all things), and I find myself saying or thinking that it is August after all….
August is a strange month. I used to find it strange that the stock market was supposed to be strong in August, or so it was until the 1960’s. Then it became a neutral month for twenty years. More recently, the market is generally weak in August. I wonder what that all means? So far this month the market has been more or less flat (just a tad up) even though the Afghan situation has seemed like it would destabilize the world.
The world, meaning my world, is somehow destabilized this year and that is making August feel weirder than it should. I know this shouldn’t bother me, but everyone seems to want a piece of me this month. So far I have already put in 110 hours this month (actually just the past three weeks, and I estimate it will be 120 by September 1st). When you think about it, that’s a lot. With the other 8 hours on my two-year old case, and the three other cases I have on the hoof (one engaged and two others under consideration), this is feeling like a full-time job this month.
With my course starting on September 1st, that is also on my mind. Luckily, I did most of the course preparation in June and July, but there is always a lot of last minute details and logistics. I’ve refamiliarized myself with the digital Blackboard program (which we used at Cornell). This is the central bulletin board for the course. I post all the reading assignments there (I only recommend a text book, but I let people have all the reading I require for free on Blackboard in the learning modules. If the full functionality of the program is 100, I probably use 5% of it. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. I want to think that I focus more on the teaching than the rigors of being pedantic. It’s a controversial topic I am sure in the academic world. But I don’t think of myself as an academic. I am a practitioner and as such, since business school students are far more focused on the practicum that students in most other disciplines. Let’s face it, most MBA students want to leverage a degree into a better career path.
The impression I have of the student body at the USD graduate business school is that they are very level-headed and practical people who work in “real”jobs unlike the students at Cornell who seemed mostly oriented towards Wall Street, or at least financial services. This all might be wishful thinking on my part since I like fundamental widget-making or even general services businesses rather than financial intermediation businesses. That’s a funny way to feel for someone who made his mark through financial innovation and financial engineering. I do not have the statistics to back me up on this, but I just feel like these students want to use finance to enable them to add value in other ways. Finance is a means to an end rather than being the business itself. Strangely enough, being asked to teach Advanced Corporate Finance (a requirement to have finance as a concentration for your MBA degree) gives me the opportunity to teach them finance in that functional value-added manner. It will be a challenge because it requires looking at the discipline of finance in a non-professional context, but one that takes advantage of all the tools and does not leave the students st any disadvantage in a fast-changing space like finance…..a critically important part of making business happen.
The hardest part is trying not to be in the egg-sucking business. What does that mean? I don’t want to be the guy who underestimates his students and teaches them something they already know. The best part of teaching is that it forces you to really learn the material you are trying to teach. I find there are no better ways to tighten the bolts on your understanding of any subject you are teaching than to prepare for a lecture, listen closely to a guest lecturer you will need to explain, and being on the spot to answer the tough questions of smart students who love keeping professors on their toes.
These days, it seems, most schools start before Labor Day. When I was a kid that was unthinkable. I’m sure it’s driven by the need to get going early enough in the Fall to give a Fall break, give a Thanksgiving break, and still wrap up final exams by mid December to give everyone their holiday break. Squeezing the fourteen weeks into that calendar is certainly a challenge, so backing up into August is to be expected.
So my August is being turned on its head. Rather than the lazy days of August, enjoying bonfires on the beach and easing into Labor Day with minimal labor and lots of laziness, It seems that given that my work is sort of gig work rather than salaried work, I am hired to take tasks off of other people’s desks. That’s a cynical view, but it’s hard not to think that way when you feel under pressure to work hard and fast while others are at the beach. I’ve spoken of the Back-to-School feeling that surrounds this time of year. I don’t really crave summer the way some people do, especially now that we live in a place with an abundance of sunshine and nice weather. To me, August is just another month. I think that makes well-suited to my choice of work. For the next four or five days, we have guests to entertain, so I’m as ready as I’m going to get for my Back-to-School moment (whether teaching or experting)…but then, it is August after all.