Come on Hauser Nation!!

Attention all reader!!! (singular is corrrect for my blog)

Please go to the this post to go take a survey for my marketing research class, there could be extra credit available!!!

Sebastian Janikowski is a Real Man

I'm a Kansas City Chiefs fan, so this field goal definitely hurt. Kansas City went on to lose the game, but if you're going to get beat, you might as well get beat by someone doing something miraculous.



A 96-yard field goal would be miraculous, unfortunately it was just a glitch.

Under-Reported Story, But I'm Sure You're Following It

So GM has plans for an IPO later this month. This is both good and bad, first the bad. We own a large percentage of GM stock, which under normal circumstances an IPO would be good for, but we acquired that stock at a very lofty valuation. What was our valuation of GM? Priceless, or at least high enough that the company was deemed so important we couldn't let it fail. . . until of course, we did let it fail. After it failed, we converted our bailout dollars to equity, said "no jets for you" and prayed for an IPO to recoup our investment. From GM's prospectus, the mid-point of their expected pricing range is $25billion, we invested $50billion, so we're going to lose some money. This isn't bad, because like the prudent investor our government is, we're only planning on selling about 1/3 of our stake at the IPO, we're diversifying our divestitures and hoping the stock rises in the future and we can sell our remaining stake then, at a profit. The problem is that from my perspective, I don't see the company's shares doing much in the near future for a couple reasons. First, GM automobiles are still trailing the Asian manufacturers in reliability. Also, from GM's prospectus, "our disclosure controls and procedures and our internal control over financial reporting are currently not effective." They go on to say this could "adversely affect our financial condition and ability to carry out our business plan," They sound confident, don't they? Their lack of confidence leads to my lack of confidence we'll ever see anything near one-hundred cents on the dollar we invested in GM, but at least we tried.

Please Solve This Issue Someone

Thought for the day, THIS bothers me. I can't think of a way to profit off of it, but I'm open to suggestions, please let me know. The only thing I could think of is using the empty space to transport coal to China, coal is cheap to mine here and China is a huge importer of coal. The problem I keep running into is that intermodal shipping containers are poor transports of coal and returning the containers to their pre-coal carrying cleanliness would have to be an absolute imperative responsibility. I keep thinking of some way to transport the coal in a bulk manner and conveyor it to railcars to take directly to a power plant, but I can't think of a way to do this and still take all the empty containers back to the factories making all of that inexpensive awesome Chinese stuff I love so much. If you have a solution to this problem please let me know and I'll give you $5 when I make my first million.

War Eagle

This past weekend, my lovely girlfriend and myself decided to take in some of the local sights and events, so we attended the War Eagle Fair on Saturday. The event itself is actually less of a regular fair and more about arts, crafts, and people peddling overpriced homemade stuff. We had been informed of the event by some people at my work and then some others here in the MBA program, they told me it was going to be big, but I had no idea how big it actually is.

We left the apartment around 9:30 on Saturday, made a quick stop by the farmers market in Fay-town to peruse the fruits and veggies, then we were off to War Eagle (which is apparently a very small city/mill/stream in addition to a yearly crafts fair). We then spent the next two hours in traffic waiting to park at the fair, it was a flippin' zoo! After we finally parked, we strolled through the various booths. My general rule of thumb after being there, the small stuff is overpriced, the big stuff is priced right/comparatively under-priced, I'm not sure if there's some kind of economic principle here or not, if I can think of something I'll try to post about it. We didn't get much beyond the expected and typical fried food and kettle corn, but the one thing we did get that I really liked was a small silver ring for the Novia (girlfriend in Spanish) at a booth with antiques. My guess (actually wishful desire) is that the ring was cherished by some sweet old lady for many years, she passed away, the vendor picked it up at an estate sale, and now we have it, and we can start the cycle over again. It might not be the case, but I can hope. My conclusion about War Eagle, it's pretty cool, but leave early, like really early.

After the Fair, we went back to the apartment and watched the Razorbacks get absolutely hosed by the officials. On the bright side, thanks to the generosity of a local optometrist, SEC teams should be spared from future officiating blunders. The Razorbacks game wasn't the only officiating problem in the SEC this weekend, check out this video and see if you laugh as much as I did.

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.

Apparently Someone Reads This Thing

This evening I was looking over the wasteland that is my blog and I noticed I had a comment on one of my recent posts, two of them actually. The first one was (I'm assuming) a fellow MBA student here and the second was somewhat more serious from a fellow named Ehram, asking "where are you doing your MBA? What are your thoughts on MBA courses in London as opposed to those in the US?" I started writing my response, it became rather garrolous, and I figured it would make a wonderful post. Not having direct experience with MBA programs in the UK, I expanded the field of the questions to something I do have knowledge on, what sets a Walton MBA apart from other MBA programs. My response was as follows: (my apologies for the spacing, Blogger is having issues, I swear I know how to write a paragraph)

Hi Ehram, I am currently completing my MBA at the University of Arkansas, Sam Walton College of Business. While I do not have direct, first-hand knowledge of any MBA programs in the UK I will attempt to put forth what I believe sets a Walton MBA apart from all schools. And I will try not to sound arrogant when I say this, but a key difference between a Walton MBA and any other MBA program anywhere is our proximity to a Fortune 1 company. As the name implies, there is only one Fortune 1 company, and we're the closest top-flight school. This proximity affords us select few in the program the opportunity not only to interact with them, but also to take advantage of all the resources they have drawn to the area. Just this morning I walked into my marketing research class (a few minutes late to my embarassment) and speaking to the class was Bob Seelert, the Worldwide Chairman of Saatchi and Saatchi. And I can honestly say that was not a random occurance, just yesterday evening I had a thirty minute long conversation with a VP of Category Management for Micheal's (North America's largest crafts and hobbies company).

Wal-Mart (the afforementioned Fortune 1 company) has drawn to the area every vendor they deal with, I know they (Wal-Mart) have a permanent contingent of Deloitte people here (I know there is a PWC and E&Y office in the area, not sure about KPMG), and they have a very active International M&A department (I know this because they employ a former Walton MBA grad). All of that is to say that while the area is dominated by a single company, we are not limited in our employment options either by the employer whom we wish to work for or what line of work we wish to follow. As an analogy, Wal-Mart's $400+billion in revenues puts them on par with the economies of Ohio, New Jersey, and Belgium (they're actually slightly larger than Belgium), something that large has to be diverse.

Another competitive advantage of the Walton MBA is our entrepreneurial track record. Last year we were listed as the #7 most competitive MBA program in the country, and that was before we swept nearly all top prizes at Moot Corp (the "Super Bowl", or "FA Cup" if more to your liking, of business plan competitions) and a host of other business plan competitions. In addition to the cash prizes, two new businesses have been formed out of last years entrepreneurship track, which is quite amazing for a program of our size. With regards to our size, being a small program ( < style="mso-spacerun: yes"> While I do not begrudge people for going to Harvard (they're obviously a great school with an exceptional track record), with near 2,000 full-time MBA students, I don't think I would be afforded the firsthand opportunities I have had here in Arkansas.

My intention was not to go this long, but I guess I did get a post out of it so it's not all bad, my regrets to Ehram for my lengthy answer, next time I'll try to keep it brief! In other university news, this weekend we get to roll Alabama on the football field, I'll try to post pics sometime next week if we win.