Currently

Currently I am sitting in a dark room behind a one way mirror looking at six U of A undergrads and a graduate student,I swear it's not what it sounds like. I'm not a creeper or anything, but for this one day I'm posing as a marketing researcher. The grad student is in a group of mine for our marketing research class and we're conducting some primary research into body wash. We're in kind of an exploratory stage right now, trying to decipher what it is we're actually going to study, so a focus group seemed like a good way to help boil down our research goals. We're videotaping and recording the audio from the group and my other group members are taking notes, something I should probably be doing right now, but it also seems like a good time to blog, so that's what I'm going to do.

These past couple weeks sure have been interesting, we just finished up our last midterm this morning, it was actually the final for a half-semester class on ethics. The class was nice, and something I really enjoyed was that it stayed away from academic ethics almost entirely and instead we debated Enron, Wal-Mart's green initiatives, and various other ethical cases. While the acedemic theories are great (I'm a cultural relativist with a firm belief in social contract theory, I know, somewhat contradictory) they don't represent the issues, challenges, and gray areas facing many global and multinational corporations in today's "flat" world.

I'm going to wrap it up soon here and get back to the real world, but I just want to speak to something I harped on last time I posted. Being at this school, in this MBA program, provides so many opportunities for interacting with the most powerful people in industry. Just last Wednesday, most of the MBA program got to go attend a conference with Proctor and Gamble CEO Bob McDonald, Wal-Mart US CEO Bill Simon, and Google US Sales Director Jim Lecinski. For my money, Lecinski was by far the best speaker and his presentation on the "zero moment of truth" was the kind of deep insight not seen from the more generalized CEO's.

In the near future, the Czar will be guest posting, he's still trying to think of a topic.