Monday, October 26, 2009

Day 164 4:43PM

When you cease working you cease to engage those parts of your brain that getting your MBA activated in the first place. My daily life right now doesn't beg for much high-level thinking (or waking up to be honest) but so as not to waste those two years of personal development here's how I keep up:

Marketing Concepts: This one's easy given that I am selling myself on a daily basis by focusing on the 4 Ps - Product (me), Price (negotiable), Placement (anywhere), and Promotion (endless). Plus, every interview is a personal SWOT analysis from hell.
Financial Accounting: Unemployment checks count as Assets. Everything else in my life is a G*d d*mn Liability.
Managing Organizations: I'm currently barely hanging in at the Physiological base level of Maslow's Hierarchy. A job may get me up a notch to Safety. Sexual Intimacy still a ways away.
Strategy: The job hunt requires me to ignore Porter's Five Forces (The Threat of Substitute Products, The Threat of the Entry of New Competitors, The Intensity of Competitive Rivalry, Bargaining Power) lest I hang myself with a widget.
Operations: Queuing theory at work at Target as I wait on line to buy private label brands of cereal, deodorant, and heart medication. By the way, the Silver Fox working the register is always the bottleneck.
Collaboration, Conflict, and Negotiation: This basically consists of me ignoring Citibank's daily phone calls asking about my late Student Loan payments.
Decision Models: My largest unemployed project to-date involves an elaborate Excel model comparing the absolute difference between multiple average values versus static values and uses a personally designed macro to copy, paste, and rank them according to specific attributes. It was created to help me decide which NFL bets to make.
Current Economic & Financial Problems: Pretty self explanatory.