There are many conferences at Columbia Business School, mostly organized by student associations. I have been to the Retail & Luxury Conference, the Media & Entertainment Conference as well as Cyberposium at Harvard Business School, but there’s almost a conference for every industry club (PE/VC, Marketing, Brite, Social Enterprise etc).

The conferences’ stated aims usually include networking / recruiting opportunities for students, raising Columbia’s profile and in theory allowing for thought leaders in academia and the field to exchange ideas.
I can’t help but feel that none of these objectives are met very well. Perhaps it is time to rethink these formats.

Fred again:

All that said, I really hate panels. I hate watching them and I hate being on them even more. I think it’s a lazy way to participate in a conference. You show up, answer a few questions, sit up on the stage with a bunch of other people, and then go home.

I much prefer the 15-20 minute talk with Q&A afterward. I think I’d prefer even more a 10 minute talk with longer Q&A afterward.

I like the idea of programming a series of interviews rather than panels that allow for deeper explorations of a given topic. Perhaps a faculty member and an industry thought-leader, or two industry folk, or two competitors interviewing each other. The Q&A sessions can sometimes be the best part of these things, but here too there’s perhaps room for improvement. I like the idea of sourcing questions from students, faculty and attendees in the period leading up to the conferences and during the sessions, this can be done via twitter, facebook, sms, email etc and then the moderator or the conference team can select some of the more interesting questions to get conversations flowing.

I also like the Pecha Kucha / Ignite formats of constraining actual presentations to short and impactful and then allowing for in-depth Q&As to follow.

In terms of networking, small break-out sesssions, breakfasts and lunches etc with the speakers can be organized and students can apply to attend or a lottery system can be implemented (I think a combination of the two would result in the most passionate and interested students attending whilst maintaining fairness in the process).

The conference format as it is at Columbia is broken. I’d like to see us fix and improve it for next year’s round.

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Fact I am posting this a week before Spring midterms gives you a sense of how over-scheduled CBS MBAs are.

First term at Columbia Business School was intense. That’s what everyone says when speaking of their MBA experience. Still nothing quite prepares you for it. Academics plays only a bit-part in the experience. The rest encompasses recruiting (probably the biggest time-drain), extra-curricular (clubs etc) and socializing (cluster etc).
It is possible to abstain from much of the non-academic side but few MBA students do, it’s an integral part of the experience and the learning.

Core & Cluster.
Columbia divides the incoming class into clusters of about 60 to 70 students each. It also mandates a core set of subjects that everyone must take (or test out of by taking exemption exams). Both of these are controversial parts of the CBS experience. My cluster (G’11) seems to have an awesome collegiate comradeship going and an impressive social calendar of events (although I am not particularly active in cluster life). Friends have spoken to me of other clusters with much more friction and a more competitive culture.
Core classes include Corporate Finance, Accounting, Leadership, Operations, Statistics, Strategy, Economics and Marketing. Most of the professors have been incredible, a few have been shockingly disappointing (in my cluster, this came down to professors either being new to teaching or bored of teaching).
The unpredictability of the experiences and the lack of choice are what make these controversial topics at Columbia. I still think a core curriculum makes sense as part of the business education but wish more diligence was involved in selecting the core professors. Students rightly feel they are paying a lot of money and are not happy when forced to take classes with uninterested or unready teachers. As for the cluster, it’s the only way of organizing 700 students and allows for a more intimate setting to get to know your peers. The flip-side is it tends to produce silos making it difficult to connect with peers outside the cluster.

Having said that business school can be incredibly social with lots of (non-recruiting) events to choose from most nights. Most of these seem to revolve around alcohol although there are also cultural / sporting happenings too. Alcohol is a big part of school. We received an email a few months ago from a non-drinking prospective student asking whether it would impact his experience. A qualified yes was most people’s response. I have a couple of friends at CBS who don’t drink or drink very lightly and they have had great times but at times have felt a little left out. The mercurial will leave CBS having met the 700 classmates (the super mercurial will have also met most of the 2nd years and in their 2nd year, the 1st years too). Almost everyone will have learnt about new cultures on others sides of the world via the overstated but still relatively international student body.

Community.
I recall reading the BusinessWeek forums when applying to business school and seeing the oft-repeated reputation of CBS as a commuter school – one where people come to class and leave, lacking the community of more secluded non-NY schools. Nothing can be further from the truth. Community is taken very seriously at CBS and the students are for the most part very involved in the school. This is obvious from day one when you are greeted by crazy energetic 2nd year peer advisors (who take time out from their holidays to introduce 1st years to the CBS experience and who are all legends in their own rights).
Combined with the school’s infamous happy hours every Thursday (free beer for all!) and all the extra-curricular activities at school, there is an amazing spirit of community that I love.

Finance.
CBS has a reputation for being a finance school. Proximity to Wall St, impressive faculty and of course being the philosophical home of value investing ensure this. It is more true than you might imagine (CBS also brands itself to varying degrees as a great school for Media / Retail / Luxury / Social Enterprise / Entrepreneurship). It is an overwhelmingly finance oriented school. The supposed vilification of Wall St the press harps on about definitely bypassed Uris Hall. The enthusiasm for careers on Wall St is everywhere and Goldman Sachs is still the Golden Catch. Some of the really smart ambitious kids seem more interested in Private Equity, Venture Capital and Hedge Fund opportunities which nevertheless are not easy to come by.
The finance focus paradoxically creates a strong outsider community for those students interested in non-finance careers.

Media / Tech.
CBS is rightly proud of its media ties. Again the NY location is key and the school makes the most of it. The Media Management Association is one of the larger and more active groups on campus. The focus though is on old media (again a reflection of NY businesses). There are some great media faculty and electives (Jonathan Knee, Sharad Devarajan etc) on offer and lots of amazing lunch talks.
It’s probably not so strong on the techier side of things or even on the new media. Boston or the West Coast probably have an advantage here.

Entrepreneurship.
I am not sure how this compares to other schools but CBS seems to be a place people come to to land a corporate job rather than start a company. The Lang Center are very active but the CBS culture doesn’t feel especially entrepreneurial. Having said that the weak job market does seem to be encouraging CBS MBAs to explore entrepreneurship. Applications to the Greenhouse program were at a record high this year.

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Speakers include Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures; Ron Stern, Marvel Entertainment; Bob Guccione, Jr., SPIN Magazine; Derek Sivers, CD Baby; Gavin McInnes, Street Carnage, Vice; David Cho, The Awl; John Sloss, Cinetic Media; Dennis Crowley, Foursquare; Jay Rosen, PressThink; Richard Tofel, ProPublica; Steven Brill, Journalism Online.

Gavin McInnes’s panel should be fun!

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I started this post while at SFO waiting to board my Virgin America flight back to NY. I could have waited to board thanks to the free on-flight WIFI courtesy of Google on Virgin flights over the holiday season but instead I’m writing this on the wpToGo app on my Motorola Droid running Google’s Android 2.0 on Verizon’s 3G network. Free WIFI isn’t as prevalent as you might think in the world’s most important tech hub. One of the paradoxes of Silicon Valley is how lo-tech and frankly outdated the hard infrastructure is compared to the second-to-none soft infrastructure.

We just wrapped up the 12th CBS Silicon Valley trip which by many counts was the most successful yet. It was CBS’ largest ever tech trek (helped by the fact the CBS Green trek happened in parallel) and arguably included the finest selection of valley companies including Apple, Facebook, Google and IDEO.

What a refreshing start to the new decade. The entreprenurial techno-utopian approach of this coast is inspiring. Every other person seems to be working at a startup, on a startup or at the very least is concerned about competition from a startup. I am guessing the valley has one of the highest engineer / capita ratios out there. The economic gloom affecting NY and most of the world hasn’t dampened the sunny outlook in the valley. Most companies we met are growing and hiring. That naturally made many of us job-seeking MBAs happy. Although it was tempered by Columbia’s outsider status in the valley.

We touched on many of the components that make the valley what it is. Staying at the Sheraton Palo Alto right across from Stanford, meeting startups Zynga and Meebo, valley giants eBay and Yahoo, hosting a VC panel with CBS alums and meeting some of the new green wave of companies and VCs that many expect to be a growth area for the valley.

Company Visits
The Googleplex is as bonkers as you’d expect. Free gourmet food, massages, day-care, the whole place has an Alice in Wonderland, Adult Kindergarten video going that is infectious and impossible not to love. The company is obviously going through some organizational teething problems to be expected with the all the growth and change it’s going through but still seemed like an awesomely exciting place to work. Hiring.
The Yahoo! campus is purple and yellow ALL over (right down the flowers and window frames) with lots of the valley perks (24-hr gyms, free weekly concerts etc). The firm seems to be getting back on track under Bartz’ leadership. Hiring.
eBay seemed fun although more on the corporate side than most other companies we met. They’re a lot bigger than a lot of the CBS students expected (campus size, # employees etc). If eBay were a retail company, it would be the 10th biggest in the US just after Target. Hiring.
Facebook was one of the most eagerly awaited visits and it did not disappoint. 2010 is going to be a key year in revenue realization for these guys and we got some insight into their tightrope approach balancing privacy and advertising dollars. Hiring.
Zynga was a company few of us knew much about (apart from those annoying Mafia War updates on our fb streams) but the startup left a big impression. They are experiencing crazy growth rates, more than doubling their workforce in the last year and hiring upwards of 300 people. They’re on cutting edge of social gaming and are trying to figure out their industry as they build it. Fun! Lots of Hiring.
IDEO was as inspiring as expected. Workplace second only to Google. The recession hasn’t been as good to them. They are branching out heavily into the greenspace (as most of the valley seems to be). Maybe hiring.
Apple was super secretive so a little more difficult to figure out / describe. Hiring for retail (and corporate – marketing, finance etc but not necessarily from CBS).

All in all an amazing trip. I have pretty much decided to apply to the Berkeley-Hass exchange program in the Fall.

Lots of other B Schools were out in the valley at the same time including Sloan who had this report on their tech trek.

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).