Do you spend a lot of time in traffic?  Do you spend a lot of time on a stationary bike?  With an iPod glued to your head?  Audio based learning tools are a great way to take down time and use it as time to learn.  Learn about what you say?  Learn about lots of things.  Let me help.

Start with an Audio Learning Portal like LearnOutLoud.  At LearnOutLoud you can download free audio like a reading of the U.S. Constitution, purchase audio and even link to audio for sale outside of LearnOutLoud.  Now that’s a real portal.

Check out LearnOutLoud and leave a comment to let us know what you download and how you liked it.

I listened to the U.S. Constitution and I liked it.  Short. Sweet.  Cross out a couple racist parts, add a right here and there and you got one nice piece o’written.

If I’m an employee, I’m hoping my employer will treat me like a dog.  Not any dog.  A search and rescue dog, and not because search and rescue dogs are lavished (if anything they manage through some of the most dangerous environments).  I really have only two reasons.

1) As I understand, (I could be wrong) search and rescue dogs are given at least some praise when they fail.

2) To qoute from canismajor.com…

“As long as it remains a game, they’ll work until they drop,” said Gina
Flannery, a search and rescue handler and trainer from the Cincinnati
area. “When it becomes work, they’ll quit.”

Now to explain.  When a search and rescue dog fails repeatedly, she gets depressed.  The dog is hard enough on herself.  In fact the dogs can become so depressed as to be unable to work.  So, the solution is to praise the dog even when she fails.  See, the dog is happy to try again, and work even harder and work for the praise as opposed to work out of fear or threat of punishment or being fired.  I’ll take that setup any day.

The second point explains itself.   If you don’t get it, read Ackoff.  If you do get it, read Ackoff.

If you would like to support the training of search and rescue dogs, please donate to the National Search Dog Foundation.  Their mission is to…

“produce the most highly trained canine disaster search teams in the nation.”

Go Sparky!

According to Seth Godin, everything is marketing.  If that is true, then that must mean that MBA Admission Applications are also marketing.  While I don’t know her views on Seth’s thoughts, I do know that Stacy Blackman believes that admissions is marketing.  In fact, she has put her experience to work helping applicants market themselves effectively. 

Applying strategies from her marketing background, Blackman created StacyBlackman.com a MBA application consulting firm.  Her organization currently offers two services.

1) Comprehensive Services – This is the whole deal.  MBA application process from A-Z.
2) Editing Services – Help to improve your written material for admissions.

While their services are not in-expensive, their claims are substantial including the considerable claim that…

“In 2005, 10% of clients received unsolicited scholarships due to the high quality of their applications.”

The Comprehensive Services start above the 2K mark but they have hourly and editing services that are under $500.  That said, they are worth checking out regardless of your budget.  Hey, if they help you get a Scholarship, the services will pay for themselves and if you take a Grockit course you can put the money you saved on test prep towards some consulting services.  You could also buy yourself a Macbook, or take a little vacation.

I recently signed up for Business Week’s MBA Insider premium service.  Now to get the basics out of the way, this service isn’t free.  It’s $29.95/year.  Also, neither I nor Grockit is affiliated with Business Week in any way, nor do we receive any compensation for this post, nor do we advertise in Business Week.  This is just a good ol’ fashioned review.  Good.  Now…

I’ve copied a partial list of the features of the MBA Insider content below.  Also, I’ve had a chance to check out some of the admissions interviews.  Most of them are with the Directors of Admissions from dozens of schools, including lots of top schools.

The sample essays from real students are also interesting.  They are well written and also from major programs including Insead, University of Michigan, MIT, Yale and more.

I watched some of the mock interviews and found them educational.  The interviews are from two major programs that show what a successful, unsuccessful, traditional, and non-traditional interview is like as well as feedback at the end of each.

I had some initial difficulty watching the videos but I checked out their “video troubleshooting” link, followed the instructions and everything worked just fine.

Personally, if I were applying to an MBA program, I would probably sign-up.  For me, the sample essays, and mock interviews are worth the $29.95 alone.  If you try it out, please leave some comments with your thoughts.  PS – I think you get access to the online paid-content areas of Business Week with your MBA Insider purchase.

Admissions Q & A
Officials from leading B-schools explain how they decide which applicants to accept

Admissions Interview Tips
Find
out what specific schools are looking for during the admissions
interviews and what types of questions they’ve been asking recent
candidates

Sample Application Essays
Learn from students who’ve been admitted, and read essays that worked

A Day In The Life
What
do MBAs do in real life? To give you an on-the-ground look,
BusinessWeek Online has invited a wide cross section of recent MBAs to
describe a typical day at work

Career Placement Q&A
Interviews on career placement with administrators from leading MBA programs 

Mock Interview Videos
Don’t blow your B-school interview. Our mock
interviews will show you what to do — and what not to do — during
this crucial step in the admissions process

School Tours
Want to see where you might be going? Use your PC to take virtual tours of more than 100 schools
 

In his brilliant Essay The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within, Edward Tufte explains how PowerPoint…

“…reduces the analytical quality of presentations…weakens verbal and spatial reasoning,

and almost always corrupts statistical analysis.”

…to quote his website where you can buy the Essay for only $7.

Who is Edward Tufte?  He has been called the Leonardo da Vinci of Data.  He is a professor at Yale and has taught in areas including statistics, graphic design and political economy.

An example of the power of his argument is found in the PowerPoint slides that were used to convince NASA that the Columbia Shuttle was not damaged.  Among the problems he cites are 1) the use of “bureaucratic hyper-rationalism” as one slide uses 6 levels of bullet hierarchies to display and arrange 11 statements and 2) the use of the word “significant” 5 times in one slide with meanings ranging from “detectable” to “everyone dies”.  His views have been seconded by other bodies that have analyzed the Columbia tragedy.

Check out at a sample of the Essay and please comment with your thoughts.

Indian Institute of Management – Ahmedabad.  That’s right.  According to BusinessWeek, IIM-A (as it is known), ranks as the most selective MBA program and as having the highest avg GMAT for an entering freshmen class.

Although it doesn’t require it, the IIM-A has an average entering freshmen class GMAT score of 750.  That puts IIM-A ahead of Stanford, Wharton, Harvard, Dartmouth, UC Berkeley, Indian School of Business, UCLA, University of Chicago, Insead, MIT, Northwestern and The University of Michigan.

They also beat everyone on selectivity.  IIM-A admits 1% of all applicants.  Compare that to Stanford’s 10%, Wharton’s 21% or even Michigan’s 28%.

You can find this information and more in BusinessWeek’s very cool Full-Time MBA Search feature.

In an earlier post, we introduced you to Russell Ackoff’s f-Laws which are…

“…truths about organizations that we might wish  to deny or ignore – simple and more reliable guides to managers’ everyday behaviour than the complex truths proposed by scientists, economists and philosophers.”

…according to the free mini book f-Laws: 13 Common Sins of Management.  This mini book is a teaser for Management f-Laws: How organizations really work.

Triarchy Press, the publisher of these books, is having a competition for the best f-Law.  So, if you are like everyone else and think you know something about business and management, then put your words where your mouth is and submit an f-Law. 

We would love to hear your thoughts.  Please post any f-Laws you can think of in our comments too.  Also, please post your thoughts and comments on the books.

Since the GMAT is an adaptive test, that is to say the specific questions and the order in which you see them is ‘made up’ as you go through the test, it stands to reason that if you retake a practice GMAT, like one of the two available in the free GMAT prep software from mba.com, even if you get better because you already know some of the questions, you should eventually start seeing some really difficult GMAT questions. (I think that last sentence was grammatically correct despite its absurd length.  I thought I would try my hand at a run-on you might see on the GMAT).

In addition to that, if you have already seen a question, then it should be easy to get through.  Sometimes, unfortunately, that can be easier said than done.  Executing a probability question quickly and accurately is not just a matter of ‘knowing’ how probability is measured, it’s also a matter of practicing doing it correctly, repeatedly. 

You can retake the same GMAT until you can answer each question as efficiently as possible.   

You would accomplish two things.

1) You would see what ‘difficult’ GMAT questions are like because you would get the earlier questions correct since you would have already seen them.

2) You will get practice executing different typical GMAT math skills on questions that you were already comfortable with.  In that way you would help build a ‘muscle’ memory of how to correctly and efficiently process questions.

Try it out and leave some comments as to your findings.