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• Lehman collapse: Dubai and Gulf give a glimpse of a new world order (telegraph.co.uk)

As the recession spirit grips hoteliers all around the world, with cheap chic and rough luxe becoming watchwords in Paris and London and New York, the die-hard luxury hound in search of a hit of the pure stuff is left with fewer and fewer options. Fortunately they’ll always have Dubai, the one city where the gilt edge has yet to wear off.

Dubai’s comparative advantage is in the area of five-, six-, and seven-star opulence, and in these tough times their hoteliers are sticking to their strengths. Our friends at Emirates Airlines have chosen the very best: they’ve put together a selection of hotels in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Amman, Jordan that run the gamut from plush desert oases to urban-luxe palaces to the daddy of them all, the towering Burj Al Arab. And they’ve provided their own Tablet Guide to the Middle East as well, featuring recommendations from Amman’s legendary Citadel Hill to the highest of high-end Dubai dining.

Peter Manice and Drew Patterson founders of Jetsetter.com, Gilt Group’s entry into the travel market, were at Columbia a few weeks explaining how their membership model addresses one of the luxury travel industry’s main problems: optimizing revenue without damaging brands through discounting. Gilt have got off to a good start in the same space for luxury fashion (they have a kick-ass iPhone app btw). It will be interesting to see how Jetsetter does and how both models scale up while maintaining the cachet necessary for the luxury brands to use them as a channel.

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Apparently Business School graduates are not as questioning as they need to be.

I haven’t seen much indication of economic / business history being incorporated into the Columbia curriculum, but there have been a few What the Hell Happened type ‘crisis’ lectures and there are often ‘crisis’ footnotes mentioned briefly at relevant points of the core curriculum.
The faculty has been developing new ‘Financial Crisis‘ content (which is available online to all students), here’s the official CBS blurb:

As the financial and economic crisis has unfolded over the past year, members of the Columbia Business School faculty have been quick to bring timely topics into the classroom. They are developing new teaching materials – connecting aspects of the crisis with subject matter in virtually every part of the curriculum.

The financial and economic crisis has brought widespread hardship through unemployment, home foreclosures, losses in savings, and a decline in confidence in the banking system. The consequences of this crisis will be long-lived, as will the debates over its causes. We are facing the greatest challenge in a generation. Columbia Business School can take pride in its engagement in meeting this challenge in the classroom, in scholarly exchanges, and on the national stage.

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Columbia rightly stresses its international orientation but the school’s location in New York City is a big plus. It can draw on high-profile executives as guest speakers and adjunct faculty as well as offer attractive internships and project opportunities. Columbia also has good national and international links, including a network of more than 36,000 alumni around the world who can provide access to information, mentors and jobs. Hundreds of employers actively recruit each year, conducting thousands of on-campus interviews and corporate presentations.

Obviously NY is a big differentiator for Columbia (and Stern).

How apt then to have watched a super documentary about Josh at the IFC a few weeks after finally moving to NY. Ondi Timoner’s We Live In Public tells the story of “the greatest Internet pioneer you’ve never heard of”. Josh got the internet early, founded Jupiter Communications and made a lot of money very quickly and then went on to spend it all in the most awesome possible ways. Like so many of the early web pioneers, Josh could see where it was all going but mistakenly assumed it would all happen far quicker than it did. Many of the ideas he spent his millions on would only emerge as viable web2.0 businesses a decade later. His failed experiments were windows into a collectively narcissist, exhibitionist, sensationalist future that is now unfolding in the mainstream.
Many of his post-Jupiter projects involved living life continuously streamed onto the internet which means Timoner must have had no shortage of archival footage to draw to tell Josh’ story. I have always been fascinated with notions of doing away with privacy (and more recently the bolted on idea of the quantified self / life). Josh very publicly did the former and it didn’t end happily. The digital natives have grown up living in public and are much more prepared for it than the web1.0 generation. Crucially though, they can always switch the lifestream off as and when they choose whereas Josh’ more extreme experiments amounted to an enforced public living mode with no opt-out. There’s immense learning we can draw from taking societal trends to their logical extreme. The world isn’t going quite as far as Josh’ visionary investigations but there remain broader lessons to be drawn about where things are moving from them.
The doc is a lot of fun and is making its way around the US and Europe. Watch it.

Movie, visionary, WIRED. Pseudo parties. New York allure. Quantified Self.

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International Orientation
Orientation started early for us international students. We were introduced to foreign concepts like ‘The American Classroom’ and ‘Dating in New York’ (sadly promised on our itinerary but not taught in class). It was mostly a great opportunity to meet other students from all over the world. Unsurprisingly China and India represented the biggest student groups followed by South Korea and perhaps more surprisingly Spain, Israel and Nigeria. There’s a grand total of 5 students from the Middle East. I am the only one who is truly non-American though – the others were either born here or have spent years living here. There’s a few students who grew up in Dubai and others who worked there before CBS (I have been feeling especially proud of our little city-state that no-one had even heard of a decade ago over the last couple of weeks). Truth be told Columbia (and perhaps the same is true of other US schools) defines an ‘International Student’ pretty loosely. How international is a 2nd or 3rd generation US citizen who has lived here all their lives but happens to have a dual citizenship? So although the published numbers indicate 30-40% international students at CBS, the school certainly feels a lot more American than that.
Internationalism or Americanization?
For all the claims of embracing internationalism, it soon becomes very apparent that these two years at Business School will very much be a case of Americanizing the international students rather than some kind of symbiotic two-way synthesis. I think this is a good thing, being a fan of most things American, and surely it’s a big part of why we non-Americans are here for graduate school rather than back home or in Europe / Asia etc.
The real introduction to America began the following week at Orientation proper. On what felt like my second first day at school, the 600 or so incoming students were welcomed by Dean Glenn Hubbard – a bonafide celebrity in the MBA world – with the first of many pep talks at once informing us of our greatness (a recurrent theme during orientation) while humbling us with the achievements of our fellow students; among us we were told were a three-time grammy award winning music producer, a former CIA agent, someone who launched an organic farm in China and a published author.
That being said banking, finance and consulting dominate CBS (both in terms of where students are coming from and hoping to go). But the school is big enough for plenty of diversity to remain.

Orientation Week at CBS is designed to do a few things: Teach incoming students how the business school works (how to choose electives, join clubs, where to get help, buy lunch, what are clusters, learning teams etc, that sort of thing); Introduce us to the Columbia culture and honor code – this is a very big part of CBS and was done primarily via the Peer Advisors – an awesome set of second year students that give up a week of their summer holidays to welcome new students; Career Prep – the focus on prepping students for the job hunt starts immediately and hasn’t let off since, again I was surprised by the intensity of this part of school (Orientation week was actually sponsored by BNP Paribas, BCG, Goldman Sachs & Co and UBS); Bonding – finally there’s a huge emphasis at CBS on building community which meant non-stop socializing / partying and countless games of flipcup and beer pong – two games I didn’t event know existed a month ago.
All four objectives were met and some.

I was one of the few incoming Class of 2011 CBS students that survived Orientation Week without getting ill (achieved by being the first one home from most of the nightly parties that often raged on til the mornings I was told), getting through the first week of classes (Managerial Statistics and Accounting mainly) sat next to 60 coughing and sneezing classmates was the far greater challenge.

The excitement of starting school, meeting so many awesome new people and the craziness of orientation was soon replaced with the more menial concerns of assignments and the anxieties of recruiting in what is still a bleak economy, but nothing can avert the inner smile I have every morning as I walk past the beautiful Low Memorial and Butler campus libraries on my way to classes.
It’s obvious I am about to experience two of the best years of what has been an already ridiculously privileged life.

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