Dorothy’s Adventures in B-School
Once upon a time, a girl named Dorothy fell asleep while reading The Portable MBA in Strategy. She must have fallen out of her chair and hit her head, as she awakened in an unfamiliar land where everyone was empowered, rational, committed to quality, and fully actualized through their work. The locals also had an odd tendency to run equations whenever they needed to make a decision.
“Fuck,”
said Dorothy. “I’m not in
As she stood there, wondering what to do, a small man in a polo shirt with a logo on the chest bounded up to her, stuck out a meaty hand, and announced: “Hi! My name is Dave. Let’s network.”
Dorothy shook the proffered hand somewhat reluctantly. “I’m Dorothy,” she explained.
“You must be in marketing. I’m in high tech.”
Dorothy wasn’t sure whether she was supposed to be in marketing because she was female, because she was wearing a black suit and pearls, or because her expression at that moment was particularly airheaded. Before she could decide, Dave had bounded away, only to be replaced by another small man in another polo shirt with another logo. “Hi,” he announced. “I’m Dave. Let’s network.”
“Are you all named Dave?” she asked.
“That’s a great question!” her new friend beamed. “We’ll have to do a survey and find out.”
He whipped out a logo-pen and a pad of logo sticky notes. “Question 1: How old are you? Question 2: What is your total household income? Question 3: How many children under age 18 do you have living at home? Question 4: Are you or anyone in your household named Dave?”
“Isn’t this a lot of fuss over a simple question?”
“We want representative demographics.”
“Why?”
Dave peered at Dorothy, his blank geniality suddenly gone menacing. “You’re sounding more and more like the Wicked Witch of the West. Maybe you should go back to the office and interface with her.”
Dorothy hadn’t the slightest idea what he meant, but she was just as glad that he was leaving. Lacking any better ideas, she walked until she saw a door beneath a sign that read Communication. “Well,” she said to herself, “it’s not Marketing, so the snacks probably won’t be any good, but maybe someone in Communication can tell me what’s going on.”
Behind the door, there were two desks, and behind each desk was a woman. “I’m the Witch of the East,” announced the short, fat one. “I’m not wicked at all. I just love students, and I’m so glad you’re here to see me.”
“I’m the Wicked Witch of the West,” responded the tall one. “What do you want?”
“Can someone tell me where I am?” Dorothy asked.
The Witch of the East answered first. “You’re on a wonderful adventure of self-discovery. You’re learning how to learn. You’re gaining understanding. You’re becoming a more integrated person.”
The Wicked Witch of the West shrugged. “You’re in the land of B-school. Once you enter, the only way out is through. You’ll be hit by storms of onerous requirements, beaten about the head and ego with equations, and forced to work in groups. And those are the parts I can tell you about.”
“She’s such a cynic,” cooed the Witch of the East. “Already I know you’re going to be one of the best students I’ve ever had.”
“You might impress me,” said the Wicked Witch of the West, “but don’t count on it. One student did, once. God, the things he could do with a semicolon. I still get chills remembering. But midway through the quantitative courses, he was gnawed to death by rats. Nowadays, I don’t get attached.”
“I remember him!” exclaimed the other witch. “That was Dave—”
“No.”
“Of course it wasn’t Dave. Silly me! It was Brian—”
“No.”
“Did I say Brian? I meant Seamus—”
“No.”
“Well, I never was good at details.” The Witch of the East chuckled. “Still, they’re all special, wouldn’t you say?”
Dorothy cleared her throat. “But what do I do?”
The Witch of the East chuckled again. “Do? Why understand yourself. Learn! Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative—”
“First,” interrupted the Wicked Witch of the West, “suspend your entire life for the next 18 months. We have to let you hold a job so you can pay our tuition, but if you think you’re having a social life, think again. Pregnant spouses? Tell ‘em to suck it in. Non-pregnant spouses? Tell ‘em to suck it up. Demanding lovers? Tell ‘em to suck—”
“This is a wholesome, family environment!” protested the other witch.
“What you need to do,” the Wicked Witch of the West continued, “is to seek the Nelson. You will have many adventures, most of them scary and wearying, on the way to the Ephemeral City of Management Excellence. Within the city, you will find the Nelson. He will grant your MBA.”
“Is there a map?” Dorothy asked.
“You don’t
need a map. There is only one road in the land of B-school, and it leads
straight to the
The Witch of the East could no longer contain herself. “You make it sound like it’s the destination that matters when it’s the journey—”
“Through hell?”
“You’re getting too caught up in details—”
“That’s why my vita has accurate citations to works I’m actually publishing.”
“I haven’t had time for trivia like updating my vita.”
“Or for doing much research since 1998, it looks like.”
Before Dorothy could thank either of the witches, they had leaped over their desks and were pulling each other’s hair out in hanks and bunches. When she closed the door behind her, the Wicked Witch of the West seemed to be winning by virtue of a longer reach and thicker hair.
Outside,
Dorothy noticed for the first time a peculiar reddish road that ran from the
Communication door into the misty distance. “I wonder if this is the road to
the
Still, she might as well follow the road, since there wasn’t anywhere else to go. Despite the warnings of the Wicked Witch of the West, the road didn’t look like it went through hell. It seemed, instead, to run through pleasant green fields mercifully free of men in logowear. So she set off to see what she could see.
She’d walked at least an hour and was wishing for shade when she saw something shiny in the distance. “I hope that’s a drinking fountain,” she said to herself for lack of a better audience. But the closer she approached, the more clearly the shiny something seemed to be a man. “It must be a robot,” she concluded. “I guess we’re doing production issues this quarter.”
“Moo.”
The sound seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. Dorothy looked around, but there wasn’t a cow in sight.
“Moo.”
No, there were no cows at all.
“Moo.”
It was the tin man who said moo. “Why are you mooing?” Dorothy asked. “Were you programmed to be a cow?”
“I didn’t say ‘moo,’” he replied petulantly. “I said ‘mu.’ Like in Greek.”
“Mu?”
“Like x-bar.”
“What’s x-bar?”
“X-bar is the fount of all creativity, the center of all meaning. With x-bar, you can calculate, manipulate, cogitate—”
“But what’s x-bar?”
“z = (x bar — mu)/(sigma/sqrt(n))”
“But what’s x-bar?”
“Using your knowledge of exponential smoothing, what alpha value was used?”
“But what’s x-bar?”
“Why use P-system rather than Q-system?”
“What the fuck is x-bar?”
“Oh,” the tin man said, “I thought you understood that. We covered that ages ago.”
Thinking before she spoke, Dorothy decided that maybe if she just pretended she knew what x-bar was, the whole problem would go away. “Oh,” she echoed, “that x-bar. I thought maybe there was another one.”
“You’ll do,” said the tin man. “Go ahead.”
“You’re not coming with me?”
“No.”
“You don’t want a heart?”
“Not particularly, no.”
She couldn’t really argue with this, and it wasn’t worth bringing up the fact that the tin man pinched her rear as she went by. Given where she’d pulled her last answer from, she could hardly blame him.
Much to Dorothy’s relief, she was at the top of a hill, and when she descended the far slope, she almost immediately entered the shade of a great forest. “At last!” she said aloud. “What a lovely forest!”
To her surprise, a whispery voice responded: “You won’t be able to see the forest for the trees! The treeeesssssssss!”
“How odd to have an echo in a wood.”
“You clearly don’t understand the attribute control processssssss…”
“The what?”
“How are you to be ISO certified if you can’t calculate sssssssix sssssssigma?”
“Why would I want—oh, dear. My foot.” A tree root seemed to have wrapped itself around Dorothy’s foot. As she attempted to kick it away, another tendril crept out and grabbed the other ankle. “What are you doing?” Dorothy demanded.
“What’s your processsssss capability index, little girl?”
“I don’t know!” With rising panic, Dorothy realized she was now entrapped by at least two talking trees.
“Start by calculating x-bar, ssssssssilly girl.”
“X-bar…. X-bar…”
A sacklike
face popped into view. Dorothy could have sworn there was straw sticking out from
under the newcomer’s hat. Perhaps it was a hick, or someone from
Dorothy grabbed the book with relief. “X-bar,” she said, consulting the index. “X-bar.” She flipped to the recommended page. “X-bar. A watering place with lap dancers.”
“Ssssssubssssssstandard assssss alwayssssssss,” the trees hissed.
“Even I know that’s not the right answer!” Dorothy shouted at the hick.
“But that’s the answer in the book! It has to be right!” The hick’s eyes would have filled with tears, Dorothy was sure, if they hadn’t been painted on.
“It’s not right! I’m going to have to gnaw my legs off to escape, and I hate raw meat.”
The hick’s face brightened, or perhaps it was a trick of the light. “A barbecue! We’ll have a barbecue!”
The trees shrieked and whistled and waved their branches. “No fffffffffffffire! No fire!”
“But a barbecue is fun! I’ve been so looking forward to having a drink with you!”
“No ffffffffire!” The trees shuddered so hard that they momentarily released Dorothy’s ankles. For an instant, she stared blankly at the trees, then she ran as hard and fast as she could. Behind her, she could hear the hick yelling, “Take me with you!” She had no intention of doing that, even if he did hope to gain a brain, which she doubted.
She dashed into a clearing where a pavilion blocked her way. “Maybe this will have a drinking fountain,” she said to herself. No trees argued with her.
Dorothy climbed the steps slowly, as much from dread as from fatigue. Her feet were a little sore, too; high heeled pumps weren’t ideal for long walks on a rough road. Inside the pavilion, she could hear the babble of voices, and she wasn’t all that eager to stroll into a convention of Daves.
“Welcome to Marketing!” a voice boomed from the logowear-wearing crowd. The voice, Dorothy decided, could only have come from a man with a lion-like mane of hair and a polo shirt with the BMW logo. And if this was Marketing, there would be good snacks. Marketing departments always have snacks.
She was circling the edges of the room, letting her hand be squeezed by men named Dave as she searched for the drinks cart, when she almost ran into a man in a Republican National Campaign Committee polo shirt. “Pleased to meet you,” he said. “I’m a close friend of the Dick.”
Dorothy blinked. She’d heard men refer to their little friends by name before, but never quite so bluntly. “I… see…” she mumbled, hastily withdrawing her hand in case his was sticky.
“My daughter’s married to the Dick’s son.”
Dorothy didn’t even want to imagine.
“Think like an investor,” he added.
“Paranoid?”
“Investments in risky ventures should draw higher interest rates. That’s why I put one-third of my retirement fund in Enron stock.”
“How… nice for you.”
“I couldn’t put it all there, of course. Gotta diversify. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket or it might get stepped on by a cow.”
“Mu?”
“Warren Buffet won a Nobel Prize for saying that.”
“Did he?” Dorothy glanced around for the drinks cart. Even Fanta would taste good right now.
“Gotta have some safe investments. That’s why I went with Xerox. Steady growth throughout the 90s. Them and Worldcom. Everyone has to have a phone.”
“Have you checked your portfolio lately?”
“That’s just a temporary downturn. Good men, all their CEOs. Victims of a witch hunt. All of them, friends of the Dick.”
Dorothy decided not to even think about it.
“I need to see a man about a cow,” she said.
“Mu?”
“Not mu again.”
“First you’ll need to depreciate, valuate, estimate—”
“I think I’ll just invest in paper shredders and bonds to build low-security prisons.”
Dorothy hadn’t realized that the Marketing Lion had come along behind her. “Paper shredders? You want a sexier product than that. Here—” He thrust a Starbucks iced grande Americano into her hand. It would have been rude to refuse it; anyway, Dorothy was so thirsty that chilled distillate of flame-roasted cardboard tasted pretty good. “Here’s a product with buzz and a strategy. There’s a Starbucks on every street corner, and it’s a lifestyle. You don’t just drink Starbucks. You live the dream.”
“I’ve been dreaming of being flavorless and expensive?”
“That’s not expensive—that’s value added.”
“They removed the flavor for my convenience?”
“They’re selling the experience. Here—” With one hand occupied, Dorothy couldn’t prevent the Lion from wrapping a Swatch around her wrist. “They’re reinventing the concept of time!”
“It’s a watch. It’s so busy being cute that I can’t read what time it is.”
“That’s why they have to reinvent time. It’s passé to be able to tell time. Nowadays, we live the time lifestyle. This watch tells people your relationship with time.”
“I think I’m late.”
“If you’re not one of the early adopters spreading the buzz, you are late. That’s why you need this watch. Here—” Dorothy fought the bright-colored sweater being thrust over her head, but to no avail. It fit badly over her suit jacket and was far too hot in the room. “Their latest ad showed slums!”
“That’s where people wear their sweaters?”
“No, silly! When you buy Benetton, you’re showing your solidarity with people who live in slums.”
“That’s not a style move I was ever planning to make.”
“Their shock ads created buzz!”
“So does cheap liquor.”
The Lion blenched—but not, Dorothy realized, at her. He was frantically consulting the half dozen cute designer wristwatches arranged up and down his arms. “I’m late,” he muttered. “At least, I think I’m late. My first BMW is supposed to be done at the shop at 4, and the second one goes in at 5—”
Dorothy used the opportunity to hand him her empty Starbucks container and fade into the crowd of Daves. But before she could work her way to the door, she found herself swept into what seemed to be a game of Ring Around the Rosie. As she was yanked and pulled this way and that, she cried out: “What is this? Why are dancing?”
“We’re not dancing,” one of the Daves replied. “We’re doing a group project.”
A chill went down Dorothy’s spine.
The Daves were chanting. “Cooperate, anticipate, delegate—”
“But what are we trying to accomplish?”
“Exascerbate!” cried one. “Exaggerate!” cried another.
“Irritate,” Dorothy muttered.
“To market, to market, to make some big bucks—”
Dorothy sighed. “We aren’t even started, and I know that this sucks.”
“We’ll start our own company,” explained one of the Daves. The others looked at him as if he were insane. “We’ll all get rich,” he added.
“We’ll all look stupid,” another Dave said.
“What are we doing?” Dorothy asked.
“This little piggie wants to market a product for a small company that can’t afford to hire real marketers,” said one Dave.
“This little piggie tries to expand the scope of the project so it will be exciting,” said the Dave who wanted to start his own business.
“This little piggie would rather be sailing,” said a third Dave.
“This little piggie knows no one’s listening to her,” added a group member who wasn’t a Dave.
Dorothy sighed. “This little piggie says oui, oui, oui but wishes she’d stayed home.”
“Let’s divide the tasks rationally,” said the first Dave.
“You’ll just rush ahead and do stuff without consulting us,” said another Dave.
“You won’t get your part done at all,” responded a third Dave.
“That’s because none of you care about the group process,” argued the second Dave. In order to idiot-slap one another, the Daves had to let go of Dorothy’s hands. She grabbed the opportunity to sneak out on the steps of the pavilion for a breath of air.
The Wicked Witch of the West was sitting on the steps, watching a large forest creature disembowel a smaller forest creature. “How’s it in there?”
“I wish I hadn’t started down the road,” Dorothy admitted.
“It can’t be that bad,” the Witch argued. “Most people live through it. Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative…”
“That’s the other witch’s spiel.”
“Oh.” The Witch thought that one over. “You’re right. Well, you need to adapt, then. Go with the flow.”
“Straight down the toilet?”
“It can’t be that bad.”
“Have you seen these people in action?”
“Only drunk, actually.”
“They must be worse, sober.”
The Witch thought that one over, too. Then she got up and went into the pavilion. Dorothy didn’t follow her. Dorothy sat on the steps and wondered if any of the birds or the bees or the flowers knew what x-bar was. Dorothy wondered how she’d done her job before B-school, if x-bar was central to management. Dorothy was fairly sure she hadn’t been in Marketing, despite her black suit and pearls, so presumably she’d been doing something more than creating a buzz. Dorothy thought, vaguely, that she might have motivated employees, solved problems, and determined strategies. But that was long ago, and she was here, not there.
The shadows lengthened, then vanished into twilight. Fireflies were starting to twinkle when the Wicked Witch of the West emerged from the pavilion. Her steps were wobbly, her pointed hat was askew, and she was wearing a bright orange twinset. With a gesture that suggested she was removing a particularly nasty sort of parasite, she unstrapped a cute watch, dropped it on the steps, and ground it beneath her heel.
“Did you have fun in there?” Dorothy asked.
“I fell asleep,” the Witch admitted. “I fell asleep, and when I woke up, I was creating a buzz.” She sat down on the steps, brushed an IPO from her skirt, and produced a Starbucks cup from who-knows-where. “The coffee sure as hell doesn’t.”
They sat in silence for a bit.
“You wouldn’t happen to know what x-bar is?” Dorothy asked.
“No. Don’t care, either.”
“Nor do I. But they keep insisting I should.”
“Does it help you get two warring employees to cooperate?”
“Judging by our group projects, no.”
“Then screw ‘em, I say. You can always make up numbers. All the excellent companies do.”
“Would it be really, really rude to point out that your advice doesn’t do a fucking thing for my current situation?”
“Emily Post might take it amiss,” the Witch conceded. “I see your point, though. I’d assumed the program was merely difficult. I didn’t expect the kind of boredom and confusion that dissolves a witch into a puddle of bile.”
“Black or yellow?”
“Black, definitely. Goes with everything almost as thoroughly as their coverage of management issues doesn’t.”
“Why am I here?”
“That’s philosophy, not management. Now if you’d like to calculate the relative costs of being here versus being there—”
“I think sanity’s an intangible.” Dorothy paused, then added, “Did someone really get gnawed to death by rats?”
The Witch turned her Starbucks cup in her hands as if she hoped agitation would make it more drinkable. “That’s what I was told. Or maybe he was strangled by the trees that don’t let you see the forest. I don’t remember any more. Sad thing was, in the ways that count, he was smarter than the rest of them put together. But the rats—I think it was rats—challenged him to do an ANOVA.”
“Could they do it?”
“Oh yes.
Rats are very fast with math. Vermin have to be.”
To be
continued…
