At Boston College I learned the basics of economics from Professor Richard Tresch. In his introductory course, Professor Tresch explained economics as “the study of how to best allocate scarce resources.” With this definition in mind, it seems quite clear that the question of time management is an economic problem. How does one best allocate his or her time when given multiple alternatives?

A guest speaker in Professor Otis Baskin’s Family Business course addressed the question of optimal allocation. Tetsuya O’Hara is the Director of Material Development and Advanced Concepts at Patagonia, a family business founded by Yvon Chouniard. Patagonia, an outdoor apparel maker, is a leader in the area of sustainability and progressive thinking. Therefore, it’s no surprise that Mr. O’Hara, a Japanese native, gave me a new perspective on time management, “Only expend 80% of your energy at work.”

Growing up in America we are often taught that more is better. That all you can do is give 100% of your effort and hope for the best. Mr. O’Hara’s message was not to be lazy, but to use the saved 20% of energy to grow as individual outside of the workplace, or in our case Pepperdine’s Graziadio School of Business and Management. He suggested that we consider new career paths or read literature that interests us. There is a tremendous amount of growth that can happen in the 20% of time that we save for ourselves.

I have found it to be tremendously helpful advice. With all the responsibilities of an active, full-time MBA candidate, the work is never really done. For example, I would often feel guilty that I hadn’t fully read an assignment for the next week to take time off for these other pursuits. Mr. O’Hara’s advice has allowed me to relax and recognize that reading a book for pleasure isn’t a sin. In fact, it’s necessary.

-ƒrankie

Frankie Warren from MBAM on Vimeo.

-ƒrankie

PS How much better are the real videos now that our production team got a hold of them? You can’t trust me with iMovie.

-ƒrankie

Messing around with MBAM! from Frankie Warren on Vimeo.

Check back here for more information in the coming weeks!

-ƒrankie

-Frankie

Business school is not like any schooling you’ve ever encountered. While that sentence is probably a disappointment for some and a relief for most, it is the honest truth and should not be underestimated. Sure, there are classes, such as Managerial Economics, that will have significant overlap with parts of your undergraduate studies, especially if you’ve had business courses previously. The first day of class might feel like the same old story. However, it isn’t in the classroom that the magic of business school takes place. The secret, in my opinion, is in developing and utilizing superior time management skills.

You will often hear from seasoned business school students that “networking” is the key to success in life. After all, we came to business school because we are concerned with our career in one way or another, whether it be changing course or continuing to advance on the path we have previously embarked. Networking is the single most effective step in finding an internship and eventually a job.

However, the question arises, “How does a business school student effectively network?” I have found that reaching a balance between coursework and being as involved as possible on campus is the secret to networking. It isn’t choosing between social events or staying home to do homework, it is accepting both and figuring out a way to get it all done. It is time management.

Professors are one of the most underutilized resources our program has to offer. In my experience over the past year, I have never found Graziadio professors to be unapproachable or indifferent to my journey towards a fulfilling career. They have always exceeded my expectations in helping me with whatever I was grappling with at the time. Professors are often well connected and approached about potential hires. Good grades, class participation and being prepared are all ways to get noticed so that you are in their consideration set when the time comes. Faculty, administration and career services will ultimately recommend those they can trust.

Getting involved outside of the classroom is equally important. As the current president of Net Impact, I have had access to amazing people. I am connected to a network of over 10,000 business people in a leadership capacity. I have developed relationships for the club with major companies across various industries. I have also worked with my fellow members on nearly a daily basis. These members have earned my trust and will definitely be the first ones I consider when opportunities arise in the future.

My advice is to take on as much as you can handle without losing your sanity. Time management is instrumental in excelling across the board at Pepperdine by being able to take on a greater amount. Here are some of the tools I use to ensure that I maximize my productivity at any given point.

Calendar:

Google Calendar is a great tool for comparing schedules and planning group meetings. Since all your events are stored on the cloud at Google, you are able to access your data from anywhere and share information about when you are available and when you are busy. For example, check out my school calendar: http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=frankie.warren%40gmail.com&ctz=America/Los_Angeles As you can see, Google Calendar only shares when I am available and when I am busy, however if we get to be closer friends I could enable your account to see all the details of this calendar. Furthermore, it is able to be synced to both iPhone and Blackberry and supports CALDAV, which integrates with calendar applications such as Apple’s iCal. I recommend scheduling time dedicated to the library and sticking to it; taking the first step is often times the hardest.

Task Management:

There are different task managers out there to organize your “To Do” lists. This decision is mainly a personal preference. Some to consider are Google Tasks (which has integration with Gmail and Google Calendar), www.rememberthemilk.com, the iPhone applications Tasks and OmniFocus.

Being involved at Pepperdine comes with a lot of added responsibility. This is not only responsibility for your own success, but for the success of others in the form of group work or planning successful club events. I found with this added responsibility I was constantly worried I was forgetting to do something. Effective task management helps relieve this stress so I’m not as worried about taking on new projects.

I personally believe OmniFocus is the best of the task managers. For each task I have to complete I assign it a due date, an estimated duration, a project and a context. So for example, one of my tasks was “Write a blog post for the EL Blog.” I assigned it a due date of Friday, July 31^st, an estimated duration of an hour, the project “EL Mentorship” and the context “Computer.” When I sit down to do work, I pull up the given context. If I was making a phone calls, I could pull up the context “phone” and see all the outstanding calls I have added to my task manager. In this case I was at my computer, so I pulled up the context “Computer” and prioritized what I had to get done based on information such as the due date and duration. It is a highly effective method, if not a little confusing. Please send me an e-mail if you want more information.

Note Taking:

There are several note-taking methods that are effective, but it is highly variable based on whether or not your professor lets you use a computer (I’d say the chance is about 50-50). For paper-based notes I would suggest the Cornell method (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_Notes) and for online note taking I would suggest a service called Evernote (http://www.evernote.com).

Evernote allows you to take notes via the browser, a desktop application or even via your phone. You can organize separate notebooks, tag your notes with keywords for searching later, or take a snapshot of the business cards you collect at a mixer (Evernote can search the text found within a picture!).

The Big Picture:

All that being said, it is important that you enjoy your time in Malibu. This is a time of your life that you will not forget. Take a moment to realize how tremendously lucky we all are that we can study business with a breathtaking view of the Pacific Ocean and associate ourselves with other motivated, interesting people. Take the time to get to know each other outside of the group or student club setting. Don’t be afraid to take risks and do make sure to take advantage of the resources available to you. With this mindset, we can all continue to add value to the Graziadio MBA.

-Frankie

-ƒrankie

With a little further thought I realized I already had all the tools neccesary at my disposal for real-time twitter updates of my favorite people pushed out to my iphone wherever I am: friendfeed and beejive.

Friendfeed allows me to create imaginary friends, therefore even if my favorite twitter user isn’t on friendfeed, I can still pipe his or her updates and see them inline with the rest of the friendfeed gang. I can then organize these friendfeed friends and imaginary friends into different lists. For example, a group called “My Favorite Tweeters.” Friendfeed also allows me to selectively distribute different feeds (home feed, groups, lists, etc) via different means. I simply select deliver “new posts” by “IM” in the header and anytime my favorite people tweet, it is sent on over to my gmail chat.

That is where Beejive picks up the slack. Because I have Beejive set to remain logged in for 24 hours after I close the application, my gmail account is open and ready to recieve the chat from friendfeed. Beejive then pushes this update to my my iPhone via the new feature released tonight: push notifications in Apple’s iPhone 3.0 software. These notifications can be seen as any combination of the following types: badge, sound and alert.

There you have it; the first Twitter client to offer push notifications on the iPhone 3.0 software: friendfeed + Beejive.

Asking users who are deleting an application for their opinion skews reporting.

Recently while clearing Apps off my phone I don’t use very often, I came across a very peculiar “feature.” The iPhone asks for a review of the application you are deleting. While the app store suffers from self selection bias, only people who care very much about the outcome either positively or negatively will take the time necessary to review an app, this introduces a new form of bias. Since users who are deleting an application are hypothetically more critical of an application than someone who uses the application on a daily basis, asking this group for reviews will negatively skew the ratings lower than is the actual customer sentiment.  While this is being applied equally across applications, it may give a negative first impression of any given application since satisfied users are never given a “call-to-review.”

    I graduated from Boston College in 2007 with a bachelor of arts in economics. I settled upon economics, due to a combination of its analytical processes and practicality, after exploring several declared majors ranging from physics to English. I viewed economics as a more “social” science than either physics or mathematics. I wasn’t buried in a lab; I interacted with a wide variety of people, but I was still gaining an understanding of the world around me. I found the complex, intricate economic systems at work in our daily lives fascinating.

    However, I was able to see shortcomings as well. According to the World Bank, 1.4 billion people live on less than $1.25 a day, or the international poverty line. I wanted to more fully explore why our economic systems fail to provide an acceptable quality of life in so many cases. I completed a minor in “Faith, Peace and Justice” which culminated in a thesis analyzing the effect of poor infrastructure, specifically roads, on economic growth in Nicaragua.

    Following graduation I accepted a position with La Jolla Bank, located in Rancho Santa Fe, CA. For the next year I was able to learn about the banking industry first hand during one of the most trying periods our financial system has ever endured. Through the accounting department I gained a solid understanding of how the bank worked as a whole. Through the appraisal department I worked in the trenches, visiting properties that the bank was looking to finance.

    Currently, I am an MBA candidate at Pepperdine’s Graziadio School of Business and Management. I have found the most rewarding experience in business school to be extracurricular. While learning the fundamentals of finance and marketing is essential, I believe that I have learned some of the most important lessons outside of the classroom. These come in the form of time management and my involvement in improving the program as a whole.

    I am the president of Pepperdine’s Net Impact chapter. Net Impact is a global network of MBA’s focusing on the issues of sustainability and corporate social responsibility. Much like my desire to understand the failings of economics, I have been moved to consider the implications of the countless business decisions made every day. I have been blessed to find a group of people dedicated to the notion that business can be used as a power for good. Some of the projects we will be undertaking next year include broad curriculum changed focused on implementing UN developed PRME principles, sponsoring an MBA to travel to Nicaragua to help grow a sustainable company for a period of 8 months, and developing several opportunities for international travel to Latin America to understand the business practices in the area.

    Also, I am serving as the Chairman of the Emerging Leaders program (EL). EL is a group of seventeen students selected by faculty for demonstrating the characteristics of future business leaders for the purpose of cultivating those skills. Once the group of students was selected by faculty, I was elected to the position of Chairman by a vote of the current EL class. As Chairman, my responsibilities involve guiding the group to accomplish the vision we set forth at the beginning of the year. I serve as the liaison between the student body, the dean and EL members. EL ’08, our class, has developed four committees which focus on improving various aspects of the program: mentorship, marketing, curriculum and orientation.

    As a part of the 20 month curriculum, students are required to complete an internship between their first and second years. I am currently working for the Los Angeles Lakers, namely their development team the Los Angeles D-Fenders, to satisfy this requirement. I am in the process of developing two programs. The first is an internet marketing presence utilizing social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, and the second is a Community Relations program encompassing community service and involving the local community with D-Fenders basketball.

    I feel I have been greatly blessed with opportunities to have extraordinary experiences and make a meaningful impact in my local community and beyond. Frankiewarren.com will highlight my experiences, both the good and the bad, as I navigate through this formative time in my life. Additionally I hope to analyze the web through the lens of a business student in the hope I can provide a fresh perspective on a rapidly changing landscape. I post this in a public forum because I encourage discussion and look forward to feedback. Hopefully I am able to present content that is both stimulating and challenging. Once again, I look forward to the journey…

Sincerely,

Frankie Warren