So, after many weeks (month? gulp) off from blogging, I am back. Have lived in silicon valley for now officially a month. Been back at Google in new business development for about the same period of time.

Things are going well aside from the inevitable sunburn I got this weekend while trying out some wines in Monterey. I really do need to remember to use more sunscreen.

I wish all friends and visitors all the best and hope to hear from all of you soon.

re. the blog: I am not sure how active it will be over the next couple of months.

• First, a good salesman can close
• Has product knowledge
• Likability matters but is not the most important thing
• think of a sale in 4-5 steps: approach, demo & presentation, trial close, and close
• When you make the sale - get out! Don’t keep talking. Buyers get buyer’s remorse
• Only asset a salesperson has is his time
• Need to divide your prospects into 3 different groups: A,B,C. C prospect - give those guys to your competition b/c you don’t have enough time. Triage is critical
• Good salesperson identifies customer’s problems or their fears (ie. what the customers competitors might be up to)
• Good salesperson knows when to shut up and listen
• Smart sales guys build profiles on their customers - what have they bought in the past, now, etc.

We had Gary Kelley talk in our CEO perspective class. As always, this class is very interesting to get a 2 hour Q&A session with a world class CEO.

Key takeaways:

• Sox, accounting, and flying planes is the easy stuff. Teamwork and communication is hard
• Re teamwork: high level executives often fall into the trap of thinking “I have the power, I have the say, so I’m just gonna decide” without checking in with other stakeholders. Its not about seeking permission from others, or that you don’t have power. Its about getting to the truth about things, and getting the right decision. You can’t get the right decision alone. You need to involve others
• Re. teamwork pt 2: it’s also a basic courtesy. Courtesy has fallen away in business circles.
• Communication is hard in a 33,000 organization. Its the toughest thing. Getting everyone informed, and getting people involved is hard, hard stuff
• Soutwest is ranked #5 in Forbes top admired companies. Southwest has been profitable every quarter since 9/11. (the only airline to achieve this)
• You have to sincerely convince those you lead that you care for them, and care about their livelihoods. After that, people will follow your lead. If you are insincere, you will most likely fail
• Southwest might acquire someone sometime this decade
• Rising costs of oil is a major problem for the airline industry, and one that won’t go away. The airlines are exploring alternative technologies to try to stem rising energy costs.

Sat in on a talk by Malcom Bricklin, the founder of visionary vehicles. He gave a very entertaining talk; he was very candid and humorous. Here are some of the quick takeaways:

• Malcom’s philosophy in life is quite simple - think of something you want, believe you’ll get it, and it will happen. He referenced the book, The Secret, which he said encapsulated a similiar philosophy.
• We saw a very entertaining clip of Malcom negotiating with Cherry motors Chinese counterparts - Malcom went half naked, taking off his shirt during the meeting to show, ‘he had nothing to hide.’ During my years in China, I never saw anyone do that in a meeting!
• Another secret to life - if you do something you really truly like, you will find immediate happiness
• Money and power as a goal is a trap - if you achieve it for its own sake, you’ll find yourself rich and powerful and still unhappy
• IP in the forms of patents is defensive thinking. Don’t get yourself trapped by your own IP. Rather, outcompete by creating the best service/product on the market
• You need to take responsibility for what you wish for in life
• Malcom’s main goal in life - making himself and all the people in his universe happy. Not to make the world happy. Not to make everyone happy. Just those who are part of his own universe. He uses this principle as a guiding principle in getting into and out of situations
• I found Malcom to be quite a dynamic guy. His energy level really surprised me. He definitely knows the art of showmanship

We hosted Paul Levy in our Practicing Management class today. The class was an intimate gathering with only about 20 other students. Paul is the President and CEO of Beth Israel.

Key takeaways of the talk:

• how to stay productive - whenever something hits your inbox, immediately do it. Don’t file it or store it for later
• The best teacher, and best manager, has a good dose of empathy
• Why is learning frustrating? Because you need to shift your framework to understand new things
• Learning always follows three steps: interest, frustration, and then pleasure
• Paul’s management philosophy - the manager is responsible for creating an environment where people can learn
• People want to, and can, set their own performance goals and metrics, and these will undoubtedly surpass any marker you as a manager will set
• don’t have a meeting without an agenda don’t leave a mtg without an understanding of next steps and who will do them and by what date

Paul was a great speaker, and really engaged the audience. The class went by really quickly, I found myself wishing we could spend a little more time with him. It seems like Paul would indeed make a great boss!

Doing my second year of TA volunteer work at UPOP. Started today, and will run full time next week. I’m looking forward to it!

A large part of what makes a manager effective is good communication along with proper time management.

Last year, I used one simple strategy to deal with my email inbox when it became unmanageable: {select all + delete}. If anything were lost that was important, someone would eventually write back a second time. If the message was not important, well, it should be deleted.

Although somewhat barbaric, this purging technique worked. However, I never felt quite right whenever I engaged in delete bombing my inbox. It is a radical action, and has some downsides. (ie. people who don’t write back to you because they think you don’t care, aren’t nice, etc.)

A good friend of mine once commented to me about inbox maintenance:

“All you have to do is deal with it immediately when it arrives. File it, reply, or delete. Don’t let it sit there.”

I’ve started to apply his sage advice, and with the new year just around the corner, I have made a resolution: keep my inbox empty at all times.

I’m at zero right now, and got here this time the hard way: dealing with every message one by one. Only time will tell if I have the discipline to maintain a clean slate.

Happy New Years!

Wow, its been a loooong time since I last wrote. Lots of updates, but I will start small: music!

I’ve been having quite a bit of fun exploring various new music ideas. These are documented on the flash player on this page. I hope you enjoy the new tunes and ideas. I’ve been working on modes, chord vocabulary, and expression techniques including trying to play more slowly! (I find it harder, but more satisfying, to play slow)

When I first picked up the guitar years ago, I took a couple weeks of lessons to learn basic chords and I also learned four songs: a phish, a zeppelin, and an Alman Bros tune. Since then, I’ve been on my own mainly.

Now that I’m focusing on getting proper theory down, I thought it would be quite useful to have a teacher again. And my teacher Sammy is one cool, crazy cat. I’ll be posting more new tunes as the semester rolls on. These days, I’m having a lot of fun with diatonic modes and exploring non-conventional pentatonic applications.

Towards the end of last year, Jose and I concocted the idea behind mbabuzz.com. It was a real simple idea: what if we allowed applicants to MBA programs to plot out their admission scores, aggregate the data, and allow people to see if there were any trends. In essence, allow users to graphically see what was happening during their MBA application process.

Jose and I built the site in our spare time outside of class last semester and we’ve had a warm welcome in the MBA community. We have about 500+ users right now who have all submitted their data. This summer, we created an algorithm which takes all of our aggregate data, and uses it to predict chance of interview and admission on an individual basis. The algorithm is pretty good, and we expect it will only get better as we get more data.

Let me know what you think of the site. Hope you like it!

Hiked more redwoods today. Hiked again with Joel and Tomomi. This time, we did about a 5 hour trek, covering over 8 miles of terrain. We were completely exhausted after the trek, but the redwoods were amazing.