My experience of applying for business school was one hell of a long haul. I think I first started thinking about doing an MBA in the Fall of 2006. It took me a long time to get myself moving; it took me until early 2008 to get my GMAT done. Then it was a whirlwind season of essays, interviews and everything else. Orlando has posted some excellent advice on shaping up an MBA application. Apart from what he has written, if I were to go through it again, there are some specific things that would have been useful for me to have known upfront. This advice may not be for everyone. What a relief that I don't have to take heed of it.

(1) The GMAT: Do the GMAT Prep software practice tests over and over again, reinstalling and installing the software to squeeze out as many new questions as possible. Particularly in the math section of the GMAT, the questions on the real exam are the same as those in the Prep software except with different numbers substituted in. You will eventually start to recognize the question types, from which you can start developing methods to tackle each type. The Manhattan GMAT forums were great for learning the theory behind the questions. I started copying the questions from the forums and grouping them into similar types. The Manhattan GMAT books are great for understanding the concepts.

(2) Get an "inside" contact. Can you find a recommender who is an alum of the school, yet who is still appropriate to do your recommendation? I know a girl who was denied by all 8 schools she applied to, except the one for which a recommender was an alumnus. I'm sure there are other factors to her applications, but I'm also sure the alumnus appeal is a strong influencer on some schools' adcoms. I know a guy who has gone a step further - he has started developing friendships with current and former student MBA application readers. Will they put in a good word for him when he applies? Perhaps most ambitious would be to impress faculty from the school. If you impressed them, would they make a note? ... Some people might ask "Am I gaining an unfair advantage"? I'm sure the adcoms are already wise to these antics. Among several thousand applicants, you might just be gaining a "fair shot".

(3) Take care of the little things. If you are applying to several schools, your applications will start to look similar - even when you try to make sure they are not. The subtle instructions in the applications are what matter. For example, the Kellogg asks about your "career plan". Harvard asks about your "career vision". Stanford asks about your "career aspiration". Wharton asks about your "career goal". I would suggest mixing up these terms will send alarm bells to the reader.

(4) The hunt for financial scholarships starts now. Applying in R1, I thought I would have plenty of time to look at scholarships and grants after I was admitted. I was wrong. Deadlines for some opportunities are before even the R1 deadlines, such as those for the Rotary Club. If there is one thing harder than getting into B School, it is finding someone that will give you free money to go.

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In my social circle, one of my friends - Ivan - has earned himself the reputation of making bankrupt boo.com, a fashion retailer of the dot com era that grew to 400 staff and burnt through $135million of investment money. Of course he is not really responsible for the bankruptcy, but this local urban myth encouraged me enough to read Boo Hoo, the story of boo.com.

What Ivan did to earn that reputation.
In April 2000, Ivan started raving about boo.com, a new online clothes retailer. He said they were offering £20 money-off gift vouchers on the first purchase every new customer made. boo.com identified a new customer by whether the email address of the customer was already on their system. If you strolled around Ivan's apartment, you would have seen wall-to-wall boo.com delivery boxes. This guy had registered dozens of web email addresses and ordered dozens of goods as a "first customer" on the site. All these goods were priced just a little over £20, perhaps £23 or £22. When boo.com went bankrupt in May of that year, everyone joked that Ivan had sent them bankrupt. So given the nascent stages of my own start-up adventure and this previous encounter with boo.com, when I saw that one of the founders had written a book about the experience, I felt compelled to have a read.

It's about who you know.
Reading the book, I realised that a lot of who the success the founders of boo.com had was through people they knew. Patrik Hedelin, an investment banker and the third founder, introduced them to JP Morgan, a world renowned bank that would seek out investment money for them. Patrick also got Sacks Arms, a world renowned law firm, to work with them. Ernst Malmsten, the lead entrepreneur and CEO, also always seemed to have people who he could call on for advice. These included Salty, an ex-JP Morgan adviser who moved on to a VC firm. Salty advised them on matters such as handling Arab investors. Another adviser was a contact at PWC who has experience in firing senior executives. The experts that Malmsten had to help in him in many scenarios seemed plentiful.

People management.
Malmsten spent a significant amount of time worrying about Patrik Hedelin, the CFO. Hedelin's lack of ability in shaping up the finance department and building a solid financial model for the company kept Malmsten occupied through large parts of the adventure. Later, the CTO, Steve Bennett would give Malmsten further grief. Once that was resolved, even the replacement CFO and even then later the Head of HR would give Malmsten personnel issues to deal with. These seemed to be a constant need to performance manage and replace someone or other.

Managing the technology.
The founders drastically underestimated the complexity of getting the technology working. The approach, as was common at the time, was a big bang release. The release date was delayed further and further. This meant the business was burning through investment money and lacking revenues for longer and longer. The viability of the business model and entire operation itself relied on the technology working.

The bottom line.
There was also no bootstrapping at the company. The boo.com were based in London and made frequent expensive visits to New York, where they stay at the Soho Grand. They hired ex-BCG consultants to open offices around the world. The company expanded very, very fast - burning money. When boo.com realized that the revenue from sales would not sustain them, they had to cull staff - but their overheads were far too much still.

In conclusion...
Boo Hoo is a great book. It would be rare to see that kind of catastrophe happen again. There are a lot of lessons in how to get quite far in building a significant company, although there are systematic failures - such as the lack of attention to the bottom line. On a personal note, I now realize that my friend Ivan had all those clothes subsidized by investors ranging from Arabs to Benetton. How strange it is how money flows.

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The business schools try very hard to differentiate themselves. Yet, just reading Tieny's Columbia admit weekend debrief reminds me of how similar the top schools are... right down to bragging about the achievements of the admits at the admit weekend. The business schools are more similar than different. As soon as one innovates something, the others quickly copy. Several years ago MIT started the business plan competition. Now every top business school in the world has a business plan competition. Among the Kellogg class of 2011, I'm sure there is even a Miss Evanston to rival the Miss New York in Tieny's Columbia class.

However, there are some things for which a school just has so much more shear enthusiasm, it is not copied - or at least copied very well - by other schools. These are those things for Kellogg. If you know anything about Kellogg, you know them already. However, this is my take on them:

• The adcom will sometimes play down the strength of the school in Marketing, to ensure Kellogg is seen as a well rounded school. However, from having professors blogging on super bowl adverts to having an extra day during the Marketing conference for Kellogg professors to update industry executives on the latest marketing thinking, the enthusiasm for marketing just seeps out. It is hard not to notice that there is a lot going on at this school when it comes to marketing. I sometimes wonder whether Kellogg has admitted so many of us bloggers deliberately, given the free marketing that we have and some us will continue to provide the school.
• At some business schools, students are viewed as the product of the school. They have little influence on how the school is run. Kellogg is on the absolute opposite end of the scale - student participation is a massive part of Kellogg experience. There seems to be almost no aspect to the running of the school that the students play some role in. For example, I was shocked to learn that even the Honor code, that thing that everyone signs to certify that they will not cheat, will respect class mates etc - even the Honor code is policed by students at Kellogg. After you graduate, your involvement continues. In the first few years after graduation, you will be called on to conduct admissions interviews. As time progresses, and as your career success unfolds, you may be asked back to talk at events or classes. Some MBAs even come back to the school to serve as faculty. The relationship between students, alumni and the school is carefully engineered to be tight.
• Team work and developing soft skills plays a central role at Kellogg. I understand that even one page essays are given as team assignments. As is often the case with team orientated work, how long it takes depends entirely on how well the team get along. As a corollary of all this team work, the students also seem to spend a lot of time socializing. One alum once said to me, "9pm to 2am was blocked out four days a week on my Outlook calendar as drinking time". Some people will frown at this, but I think this is great. So much socializing can only lead to perfecting skills such as of small-talk, which is a key part of Western - and particularly US - culture. The BusinessWeek specialty rankings, based on data from MBA recruiters, bears this out: Kellogg grads top both the soft skills metrics of Teamwork and Communication.
  

All of the above is nothing new; it is the kind of information that is already in the guide books. Yet, I have to say that I have really only started appreciating these differentiating aspects of Kellogg now that I'm on the way there...

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A week does not seem to go by in which the New York Times does not begrudge the demise of newspapers, with the most recent discussion debating the effect of micopayments on journalism. In the meanwhile, I can not help but notice the new newspapers that are emerging from the woodwork. I can spot at least three different types of new newspaper.

Newspapers That Selling Something
The premise of the Free business model is that when certain types of goods become widely available, you need to start looking at what else there is in the offering that becomes scarce and chargeable. ClearAdmit and similar admissions consultants show how publishing MBA news markets their MBA admissions consulting services. ClearAdmit maintains a blog updated at least once a day. The blog covers news from the MBA schools - sometimes from the schools' own press releases, but also from direct sources, such as interviews with schools admissions staff. For ClearAdmit, and other similar consultants, maintaining such a blog attracts regular visitors to their site more effectively than an informational website would. The blog also allows ClearAdmit to demonstrate a level of credibility for the admissions consulting services that they sell. ClearAdmit is not unique in publishing news to sell other things. The blogs at harvardbusiness.org are intended to attract readers to long form articles in the printed Harvard Business Review and even longer form text in the form of Harvard Business School Publishing's books. Tescos Magazine consists of lifesyle articles with suggestions in side panels of related products that can be bought.

Hyper-local new sites that feature user contributed stories.
TribLocal and MyCape are hyper-local sites that allow local residents to submit their own stories. The promise of sites such as these is substanitally low overheads - there is no need for a print edition or even paid journalists. Even the New York Times seems to agree that there could be promise in this model: on Monday 2nd March they are launching their own hyperlocal blogs with contributions open to local residents. An obvious revenue generator for such hyper-local publications is hyper-local advertising. If you are the biggest grocery store in Brooklyn, you are not going to advertise on the internet using Google Adwords (the monoploy internet advertising platform). If you were to do so, your ad would be displayed to any person randomly searching for Brooklyn or grocery related subjects on the internet. The conversion rate for ads displayed to actual goods sold would be low. However, on a web site where the vast number of readers are from Brooklyn, such as a hyper-local news site, the grocery store can be sure that an ad's coversion rate is as high as it can be. Hyper-local news sites open up internet advertising to small to medium sized location based businesses. [Update: CUNY's involvement in NY Time's hyperlocal blogs].

Free Printed Newspapers
With the availability of free news on the Internet, London has seen the arrival of free printed publications. Metro started in 1999, but in recent years has been joined by The London Paper, London Lite and Sport, an infrequent sports magazine. As though from a Clayton Christensen case study, this "free newspaper" disruption even has a different distribution mechanism to the incumbant paid-for newspapers: these papers are typically handed out at London Underground train stations. The rise of free newspapers has been phenomenal and not a local phenomenon. In Madrid, free newspapers are more popular than paid newspapers. The Guardian describes the financials for a mainstream newspaper to go free, and indeed even suggests that most mainstream newspapers should go free so that they can drive traffic to the newspaper's online site and fully embrace the internet phenomenon. A study into free newspapers describes the differences between distribution driven (i.e. free) newspapers and content driven (i.e. paid) newspapers. The study suggests that free "distribution driven" papers are targetting the specific needs of the people in the distribution channel, i.e. the needs of commuters - typically a younger audience in search of short articles to be read on the go. These free newspapers are successful in running off a predominantly advertising only revenue model.

In conclusion, traditional newspapers may be dying, but journalism is thriving. New kinds of newspapers are emerging to more closely meet our needs than that which the traditional newspaper, sold from a newspaper shop or stand, has typically served.

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In the distant past, all television in the UK came through a terrestrial TV receiver. The big competition was between the BBC, iTV and Channel 4 – the big TV channel operators. Yet now, in this day and age, these same broadcasters are forming tight-knit partnerships that mean they will share resources ranging from technology to news reporting facilities. These same broadcasters are also the major partners that constitute Freeview, the venture that owns the digital terrestrial television platform. Has the basis for competition shifted? Rather competing TV channels, are we entering a world of competing TV platforms?

Two big pillars have emerged in the UK broadcasting landscape over the last 20 years. Struggling as independent satellite television operators, in November 1990 Rupert Murdoch's Sky Television and the BSB merged to form BSkyB. By February 2007, a series of mergers of numerous independent cable television companies starting as far back as in 1997 led to the formation of a single cable television operator, Virgin Media.

Currently iTV, Channel 4 and Channel 5, the commercial terrestrial television broadcasters in the UK, are starved of advertising revenue and struggling in stay afloat. The BBC is funded by a compulsory television license fee that the British public pay. Already a small portion of this license fee goes to the commercial terrestrial broadcasters. Facing bankruptcy, these broadcasters are now asking for a larger slice of the license fee. In response, the BBC has instead proposed a Public Service Broadcasting partnership between the terrestrial broadcasters. This partnership is designed to exploit the BBC's vast scale, providing the other broadcasters with some of its technology, television making facilities and other resources. However, is this the first step in the eventual merger between all the terrestrial television broadcasters?

In the same way that the UK has a dominant satellite television operator in BSkyB and a dominant cable television operator in Virgin Media, are we now seeing the emergence of a single dominant terrestrial television operator? The groundwork for such a merger is already in place. Following analogue switchoff, the terrestrial television platform will be entirely digital and entirely dominated by Freeview. The Freeview partnership consists of the BBC, iTV, Channel 4 as well as Sky and Crown Castle. Already the BBC, iTV and BT are working on developing the Freeview platform to exploit integration with the internet. This integration will make the Freeview platform competitive with BSkyB's satellite platform and Virgin Media's cable plaform.

The next five years promise to be interesting for the television landscape in the UK. Long gone are the days of competition on the single terrestrial platform between the BBC, iTV and Channel 4. The value chain for television broadcasting is changing. The competitive pressure in the chain is moving from the channels to the television platforms.

Updated, 2nd March: 

• A useful link: Bonfire Of The Broadcasters: ITV, Five Cuts Expected; C4/BT Vision Merger Mooted [paidcontent.co.uk]
  

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I've been reflecting on my recent trip to the US, and in particular the lifestyle differences between Europe and the States. Really, I'm comparing London to Chicago and New York, but generalizing to Europe versus America makes for a more dramatic blog post. Many MBA guides and experts will compare European and American programs, but few will consider the lifestyle issues. So today, I've decided I should highlight these for anyone considering programs across both sides of the pond...

(1) Food in the US has more calories than that in Europe. In the US, it is difficult to find a sandwich with less than 500 calories. In the UK, most sandwiches will have less than 500 calories. Portions in the US are big. You could eat your entire daily caloric intake at a cheap oriental place serving Chicken Teriyaki. And whereas in most places the Teriyaki will have been just grilled, you can be sure the Teriyaki you happen to be eating has been deep fried first before grilling - to ensure you get all those extra calories for your buck that the dollar provides. Serves me right for going to a cheap oriental place.

(2) In Europe, things are spelled a little funny. It's true. Why would you spell centre with a 'r' before the 'e'. Surely center makes more sense? It gets worse: In some parts of Europe "hello" is spelled "guten tag".

(3) In the US, weird units are pervasive. At zero degrees Celsius, water turns to ice. At 100 degrees Celsius, water boils and turns to steam. Zero and 100 - simple and intuitive numbers to help anchor cold and hot. What is Fahrenheit anchored in? We're only just getting started, because there is pounds, rather than kilos and a host of others...

(4) Particularly outside London, life is just not as advanced in some parts of Europe as in the States. There are large swathes of Europe that are still struggling to get an Internet connection, let alone broadband. Whereas "Free Wifi!" is a way to attract consumers in bars and cafes in US towns such as Evanston, free wifi is just unheard in many parts of Europe. It doesn't help that the French pronounce Wifi as "wiffy", as in "something smells a bit wiffy here".

So there you have it; four points of consideration when you weigh up the likes of INSEAD, IMD and LBS against Wharton, HBS and Kellogg.

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I was fortunate enough to attend the Kellogg 2009 Private Equity and Venture Capital Conference. The conference's keynote was given by Tim Draper, a founder member of the prestigious venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

What I found most interesting in Tim's presentation was the three things that he looked for in companies that he invests in:

1. Zeros a typical cost in the business model. e.g. Hotmail removed cost of delivering post, Amazon removed cost of inventory.
   
2. Revolutionises some existing business. e.g. Hotmail revolutionised postal mail, Amazon revolutionised bookshops.
3. Solves a problem.

While the second and third points are not extraordinary, I did think the first point to be fascinating. The reason that the Internet has become the powerful force that it has is because it is zeroing costs found elsewhere. You no longer need to have physical copies of music in the form of CDs etc. The same is true for newspapers, the contents of which can easily be read online. In the meanwhile, Facebook zeros the cost of keeping in touch with people - you no longer need to email or phone someone to see what they have been up to; they update their profile and you can respond as and when you want. eBay zeros the cost of the finding someone to buy your goods. Wikipedia zeros the cost of assimilating vast amounts of information on any topic.

It makes you wonder: how can you take any traditional business and zero its cost in the new media world?

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