While the IE blog describes the lower level workings of PUMs etc, an article in Business Week describes how Microsoft's management have organised themselves:

Ballmer realized that Microsoft needed new methods to manage an ever-more-complex company. He first tried to organize around different kinds of customers. The idea was to get product-development groups more connected to users. But the reorganization didn't work. Decisions about such widely used products as Windows, for example, spread across too many of the new divisions. Not even a year into his new job, Ballmer was stressed out and looked it.

Now, Ballmer feels like he's on the right track. He has lost 52 pounds in the past year. He is tanned and clearly comfortable in his CEO role. A series of epiphanies brought him to this place--the result of reorganizational experiments, face-to-face meetings with execs at other companies, and thirsty reading of management books. Good to Great by management guru James C. Collins and Welch's Jack: Straight From the Gut got him to think about solving a wide variety of problems systematically, rather than trying to fix them on an ad hoc basis.

From this patchwork, Ballmer stitched together a quilt of management processes that, he says, especially suits Microsoft. Ballmer elevated the importance of something he calls the "organizational health index," a key factor in measuring executive performance. Taken from Procter & Gamble, the OHI is a survey of employees who are asked to rate their bosses on their leadership skills. By studying GE, Ballmer crafted a new system to identify and promote promising managers.

Perhaps Ballmer's biggest innovation is something called the Executive P&L, launched in April. It's a balance sheet that divides the company into seven distinct businesses and gives each unit's leader the financial tools to measure its performance. Ballmer hopes the device will empower execs who have long worked in an environment where everything was run by the CEO. In the past, managers would know the costs of developing a product but not the cost of selling it. Now, they can see their costs end-to-end, giving them the information necessary to make decisions about allocating resources without having to run it by Ballmer.

To some managers, it's liberating. On June 3, Senior Vice-President Doug Burgum walked Ballmer through his financial plan for his corporate-applications group for the coming fiscal year. Ballmer seized on an unusually large bump in R&D spending. In the end, he made it clear it was up to Burgum to decide how much to spend. "In some ways, the review felt like a really good board meeting," says Burgum, who ran Great Plains Software.

To make sure the new management system ticks along with Swiss precision, Ballmer has adopted a calendar with regularly scheduled meetings. The cycle, which Ballmer calls the "rhythm of the business," kicked off on May 29 with seven days of business-plan reviews. In October, the company's 21 senior vice-presidents will meet for two weeks with their staffs, analyzing their organizational structure and their development needs. A month later, leaders of the company's seven businesses gather for seven days of high-level brainstorming sessions designed to identify new opportunities. And in January, after the results of Microsoft's annual customer-satisfaction survey come in, the same execs meet for four days to analyze them.

Gates had his "think weeks," where he secluded himself at his family's retreat in Hood Canal in northwest Washington to ruminate on the Next Big Thing in technology. Ballmer has created "management sync weeks," weeklong events every quarter with day-after-day of meetings involving the executive staff and board members. The idea is to coordinate themes and strategies among the company's important decision-making groups. The first sync week begins June 17.

While everyone else seems to be enthralled with the Scoretop controversy, I've been perplexing over something quite different. Stanford's hallmark What matters to you most and why? essay question is surely the most gut-wrenching question since the career goals question, which in itself took me several weeks to figure out for myself.The most useful advise I've been able to find on the internet seems to be this little segment from here:

    * What matters to you most and why? (Stanford's first question)
          o Apparently, the most common answer is 'balance in life'. Maybe you should try something different..
          o There are no right or wrong answers or approaches to this; it was my favorite essay question actually for this reason. You can write just about anything. However, I would suggest you look over the accomplishments that you want to talk about in your essays and you career goals. Then find a basic thread that can intertwine all of them. This will be something vague but poignant: 'helping other people' or 'taking on new challenges'. Then there's your essay structure: open with how you like to take on new challenges and use all of your essay material as proof of that. If you write something too specific such as: 'What's most important to me is bringing potable water to this village in eastern Africa' then a good part of your essays will probably be irrelvant to this thesis statement.

A second item which may help some is the following exercise from here:

As Stephen Covey says, clarify what is most important in your life. Decide what is most worthwhile to you. Knowing what is most valuable to you gives you direction in life. Rank each in order from 1-10 (1 being least important and 10 being most important).

* Career

* Health

* Home

* Family

* Spirituality

* Finances

* Leisure

* Learning

* Creativity

* Communication

This should give you a fair assessment of what your priorities are and where you want to be. Now what are you most grateful for? Make a list of 10 things and write them down. Finally don't forget how far you’ve come. Make a list of 10 of your proudest accomplishments for this year.

For me, simply thinking about other essay questions is giving me food for thought on this Stanford question. Particularly other essay questions from other schools. These ones in particular, all for 2008/9, might provide some areas of overlap:

Harvard:

1. What are your three most substantial accomplishments and why do you view them as such? (600-word limit)

3.2 Discuss how you have engaged with a community or organization. (400-word limit)

Kellogg:

2: Describe how your background, values, academics, activities and/or leadership skills will enhance the experience of other Kellogg students. (One to two pages double-spaced)

3: Describe your key leadership experiences and evaluate what leadership areas you hope to develop through your MBA experience. (One to two pages double-spaced)

Kellogg is an interesting school. When I visited the school in early April, it was probably the most haphazard of my visits: classes were cancelled without notice, tour guides did not turn up and even the weather was slightly grim. I don't know much about marketing, but for a school that is reputed to be the Marketing King, it sure was not thinking too much about customer touchpoints.

By comparison, Kellogg's downtown neighbours, Chicago GSB, was a slick operation. I attended their Chicago Live event. The event kicked off with some good speeches from the admissions team and, on the whole, the event was quite well run, even if some parts were dubious (like the loud and rowdy pub evening).

However, it is Kellogg that has been growing on me in the last few months. There are articles all over about the delight that is Kellogg, with the most recent being Business Week's Choosing Kellogg. Perhaps the school's touch points are not as important as the touch points with what everyone else says about the school?

So I have stretched my initial list of MBA schools to apply for from 4 to 5 to include Kellogg. Just adding this one extra school makes the application process suddenly seems like a lot of work, but I am only applying to schools that I would not mind matriculating to.

Here is my shortlist, in alphabetical order:

• Harvard Business School
• Kellogg School of Management
• MIT Sloan
• Stanford GSB
• Wharton

I've been working on my Career Goals essay. As I have hinted about previously, it has been slightly torturous. It has forced me to think really hard about the time-line of my life leading to the MBA and afterwards. After reading around and a lot of thinking, I've finally gained some clarity. As unlikely as it would have seemed to me even months ago, in broad terms I am thinking of a Private Equity type role immediately beyond the MBA. In the much longer term, I fear I'm going to spew out the usual 'starting a company' spiel that I'm sure many candidates will give - but it is what makes sense for me to say.

So what helped me? Perhaps one of the most useful articles that I have found is Jaguar Paw's Career Goals essay framework. Although it is structured in a similar way to how I was already thinking about approaching the essay, it has made me think more about my Short Term Goal following the MBA. I have also been inspired by the posts of many people blogging out there on all manner of MBA-related things. Some people say they go to MBA school to reflect on their life. I think there is plenty of reflection to be done in simply applying!

Now all I need to do is finish writing this essay in "400 words", "1000 words", "2 pages" and whatever other forms that the different schools require it in.

I listened to a speech by the BBC's Mark Harrison (Head of the Multi-platform, Innovation & Development Studio) today and was impressed that someone has been thinking about the collision of the Internet and broadcast technologies in a similar way to me!

Mark pointed that all the substantial and popular web sites in the world today are platforms for content, e.g. Facebook and Youtube. None of the big sites are content providers. Yet, these platforms, particularly something like YouTube or VLogs, do not produce content of the quality that the BBC does. The BBC has significant expertise in producing quality TV programmes. Youtube and other sites hosting content do not host any content that matches the quality of the BBC's output. Mark stipulates that the big challenge in the coming years is producing a site or technology that successfully marries the Platform and the substantial content quality that is possible through BBC expertise in content production. If and when this becomes a reality, a 'creative dividend' will be realised that truely redefines what is possible and takes TV programme production to the next level.

My personal opinion is that YouTube makes it easy for people to upload and share their videos. However, to produce a quality programme requires many different skillsets, such as script writing, acting, directing and post-production to name a few. Very few people or groups of people have all these necessary skills to produce quality content. Instead, on Youtube we get clips that feature a few of these skills in isolation: perhaps a 3 minute video that features a great comic script or another video with inspiring photography. I expect that in the next ten years technology will emerge that will make it easier for different people with different skills to collaborate online to produce a quality programme. In the same way that software like Firefox is produced in an 'open source' environment, ways of producing 'open source' TV programmes will develop. In the same way that open source software like Firefox includes contributions from developers working for commercial companies, 'open source' TV progammes may feature skilled people from the BBC and commercial companies helping in the production.

If and when such a technology that allows for colloboration and creation of quality content emerges, this will truly reshape the way TV programmes are produced. If this method of production becomes widespread enough, it may even become a 'Youtube killer'.

I've been catching up on some of Marc Andreessen's posts; there is one in particular that stands out - career planning. It starts with:

The first rule of career planning: Do not plan your career.

There is irony in this for me. I'm looking at doing an MBA in year or so, and the one thing that almost all the business schools ask is for you to describe your career goal. In fact, the 'career goal essay' is considered one of the most important parts of any MBA application. He goes on to explain:

The world is an incredibly complex place and everything is changing all the time. You can't plan your career because you have no idea what's going to happen in the future. You have no idea what industries you'll enter, what companies you'll work for, what roles you'll have, where you'll live, or what you will ultimately contribute to the world. You'll change, industries will change, the world will change, and you can't possibly predict any of it.

…

Career planning = career limiting.

So what should you instead?

Instead of planning your career, focus on developing skills and pursuing opportunities.

The rest of the article focuses on taking risks, because you can only really make your mark on the world by taking risks. Speaking to friends, it always seems easy to just ‘get comfortable’ – to stop pushing your career. Andreessen pushes us to take risks if you want to succeed. People don’t get ahead by not taking risks. Andreessen goes into some depth about risks, but the sum is as follows:

The issue is that without taking risk, you can't exploit any opportunities. You can live a quiet and reasonably happy life, but you are unlikely to create something new, and you are unlikely to make your mark on the world.

So this makes me wonder about the MBA career goal essay. Can it ever really be possible to define what your career goal should be?

How can companies get consumers enthused about their products as a way of boosting product sales? Seth points to the desperate attempts of Tide and the Chives Marketing Board to do just this. Tide has sent out an email to a number of customers to survey their laundry habits. The Chives Marketing Board has begun an advertising campaign to urge consumers to increase their daily chive intake.

Charles Leadbeater's We-Think and Don Tapscott's Wikinomics suggest that the social movement of the web will transform a number of industries such that it will become normal for consumers to be involved in the actual production of what they consume. The Linux operating system is a famous example of this, but there are other examples, such as OhMyNews - the South Korean news site that accepts articles from readers.

How can we apply this idea to Tide and the Chives Marketing Board?

Consumers of Tide could probably discuss online their laundry habits, rather than in a survey, and help distill what it is about the brand they like and don't like. This might then focus the researchers and technical teams at Tide to address the problems they have with their product, as well inspire them to satisfy any latent needs. A market like the washing powder market does innovate, even if slowly. However, how much of this is consumer led and meeting consumers' specific needs?

With respect to Chives, I think it is merely a matter of determining some great foods which use chives as an ingredient. Again - a recipe invention site where people can show off what people have come up with might re-ingite some interest in chives; something like the Simpsoniser for chives.