Final Week! Flashcards
If the goal is to “grow sales” need to
increase revenue, don’t worry about costs. Can we raise prices to raise revenue? Are there good substitutes in the market if we do? Can we lower prices to increase sales? Can we expand to new markets? Economies of scale. Can we create new products? Economies of scope (avg cost to produce is lower if produce more types of goods) Can we better market to existing customer segments?
of businesses in USA
28M
Failures:
Failure #1: SAHS History Lesson Plans
Failure #2: Elevator
Failure #3: Pep Rally
Failure #1: Lesson plan structures with history department first year
I had really learned how to teach at a charter school in Newark called North Star Academy. They were one of the highest performing schools for low income students in the country - they were taking students from poor neighborhoods and getting them all into colleges, many of them on full scholarships. People were literally traveling around the world to visit and learn from our school. North Star did many things right, but one way in which they were unique was they required all teachers to follow specific lesson plan structures that built in best practices for each classroom. For instance, all teachers had to give students independent work to do for the first five minutes of class, so that students would be calm and productive from the time they entered your room and you could check in with students and set the tone for a productive class. Nobody really challenged these best practices at North Star because they were clearly so effective, because all leaders and managers were totally bought into them, and teachers’ evaluations measured implementation of teacher practices like these. As a young teacher, being required to implement these practices just seemed like learning how to teach well, and I was very successful in part by using these strategies.
Therefore, when I became an Assistant Principal at another school, I thought that I should replicate these best practices, both on the teacher side and the management side. I thought that I could successfully require all teachers to use common lesson plan structures and they would be enthusiastic to do so, once they understood how effective they were. I was ready to collect and give feedback on lesson plans, just like my bosses did at North Star.
This approach failed miserably. The culture at my new school was totally different because Andy was opposed to anything didactic and didn’t believe instruction was the key to success - he wanted teachers to spend most of their time building relationships with students and parents and didn’t believe the details of a lesson were the key lever, so he didn’t write lesson plans when he was a teacher and he didn’t believe that teachers had to write lesson plans. As such, he didn’t put any kind of guardrails on instruction and didn’t really support my desire to collect and give feedback on lesson plans. However, I still thought that I should collect and give lesson plan feedback and should require teachers to implement best practices.
A few of my veteran teachers were very annoyed that I had higher requirements for lesson planning than their friends in other departments had, that they had to put more work in, that they had less flexibility in how they designed their lessons. Often they just disregarded the lesson plan structures and didn’t submit their lesson plans to me. I tried to hold them accountable but my principal clearly didn’t have my back. It was really tense for a bit as I saw these teachers really struggle and saw that they were fairly uninspired as a result of my management.
For the remainder of the year and for the entire next year, I totally changed my approach. I focused on setting very clear vision for what excellence looked like in student work samples, or the outputs, and didn’t put much emphasis on evaluating the inputs such as teacher actions or lesson plan design. I used data from student writing samples and exams to get teachers to deeply reflect upon what they were doing effectively and ineffectively and then coached them to improve upon their ineffective behaviors, based upon a shared understanding of the result that we wanted to change. Teachers had much more flexibility to design lessons creatively and to solve problems creatively.
I learned a ton from this failure. 1. It’s so much more effective to influence rather than tell, unless safety is involved. 2. It’s critical to be aligned with your manager and with the organizational culture or everything you try to do with your team will be much harder. 3. My job as a manager is to set vision, coach, motivate, and support, not to tell how to do the job.
Failure #2: Elevator
- This is a story about my failure to gain alignment with my boss and my boss’s boss and my failure to change course when I knew I didn’t have alignment.
One of the five teams I was managing was our operations team, which in part is responsible for maintaining excellence in facilities. This team was overwhelmed with major projects that directly affected our ability to achieve of mission of preparing students for success in college - for instance, they were fighting a major real estate developer who was doing construction during school hours that was so loud that students couldn’t hear their teachers, and they were improving safety systems to make sure we were prepared for emergencies in our building.
They were already above capacity when our CEO, my manager’s manager, decided that it was important that we address an escalator in our building that would break down once every few weeks. We shared a building with five other schools and the elevator was probably 70 years old and was maintained by bureaucrats in the Department of Education who moved slowly on everything and had a shoestring budget. The escalator was not a priority for them, no matter how many times we raised concerns about it, because they had legitimate safety issues in their hundreds of buildings throughout the city. The escalator was an issue for our CEO because she brought potential donors to our school for tours, and she didn’t like that they’d either have to walk up stairs or take an old elevator.
My managers and I agreed that fixing the escalator was a not a legitimate priority, that the city wouldn’t dedicate the necessary resources to fix it (and that it would be ethically questionable to put so much political pressure on them to spend the little money they had on this issue when other schools nearby had legitimate safety issues with their facilities). We agreed to continue pushing the city, but that we wouldn’t spend so much time on it that it would hurt our other priorities that were actually mission-critical. My bosses thought that if we communicated incremental progress to my CEO, that she’d be fine with us and would give us room to do the work we really needed to do for our kids.
I should have realized that my bosses and the CEO were not aligned and that he wasn’t willing to spend the political capital to tell her so directly. Instead, it appeared to her that we were just incompetent and too slow to move, since she didn’t see rapid progress. As a result, she had less faith in us, resulting in us having less space to make the necessary bold decisions we had to make to be successful as a school, with everyone terrified of her wrath each day.
I should have known that we were destined for failure if my bosses were not aligned with their manager, and I should have insisted that we fight for more resources or find a way to deprioritize other projects to free up resources if nobody was willing to tell her directly that her priorities on the issue were off.
In the end, I learned how important it is to gain alignment and buy-in up the hierarchy. It’s better to do many great but not perfect actions efficiently because you have buy-in than it is to struggle to do fewer ideal actions without buy-in. Obviously you should work to gain buy-in, but if I know that my boss is not aligned with her boss, then I need to re-evaluate how to proceed.
Failure #3: Pep Rally –> quick background about NSA culture, my belief in different management style of promoting ownership and giving a lot of autonomy. Made the mistake of not carefully checking pep rally plan that Meredith had owned (new hire but highly acclaimed and brought in to our school as a top performer, very unsure how to manage her against my instincts to be more involved. She failed to oversee her team, I failed to oversee her because I wanted to give autonomy and not feel like a micromanager and I was stretched very thin with many open spots so I couldn’t thought partner with her along the way. Saw the plan the morning of and I had to scramble last second to salvage. I learned that I need to be comfortable laying out on the friend end the criteria for success, giving a lot of flexibility to produce a first draft by a set benchmark date, then feel comfortable making my direct reports own revisions or redoing to ensure the criteria are met.
California’s house of representative count
53 out of 435 –> about 12% of the population of 320m
$200M growing at 10% for 3 years will be worth?
260M
Estimate Baseline: 200,000 CAGR: 50% Years: 1
300,000
Estimate 50,000 / 300
167
Estimate 60% x 260,000
156,000
Google 2 Minute Pitch
I’ve spent nine years leading change within schools; 1. first as a teacher, 2. then as an Assistant Principal, and then as an 3. operations and strategy leader. I started my career with Teach For America, working in one of the lowest performing high schools in North Carolina, where only 11% of students were reading at grade level, and where 99% of students were poor. Their hopelessness was tragic; they thought the best they could do was work at the local nail salon or Burger King. By influencing students, parents, janitors, and administrators, I was able to solve enough problems to lead my students to one of the highest growth rates on state exams in Carolina.
After a few more successful years in the classroom, I realized I wanted to expand my impact and learn transferable leadership, management, and problem-solving skills. Therefore, I moved into administration. I first managed history teachers in Newark. Then I was hired as an Assistant Principal by the top charter school network in the country to help design and launch their flagship high school. Later, I transitioned into more business-like roles, leading school operations and strategy.
In these roles, I was given several ambiguous problems that I had to creatively solve structure and solve. [Pause] For instance, at Success Academy, my principal said - “the 9th grade team is failing, I need you to fix it?” so I did. A year later, he said “students with disabilities are failing, I need you to fix it.” So I did. Then, at Uncommon Schools, our COO said “We need to open two new schools, figure out where they should be located?” So I did.
These projects changed my life [pause] I realized that I loved problem solving and strategy projects, and that I wanted to do similar work across a wide range of industries. However, I didn’t know anything about business, so I decided to get my MBA to learn a basic business toolkit.
Now I’m thrilled about the possibility of joining Google’s People Operations team for four major reasons: 1. I am passionate about technology and about Google in particular, given the impact of Google’s products on my life in education. For instance, I used Google Sheets to create tailor-made attendance trackers to ensure our students’ safety; I used Google Sites and Hangouts to overhaul our schoolwide communication systems, and we used Chromebooks to teach students how to do research and how to write college-level essays. 2. I am a deep believer in Google’s wider mission of making the world’s information widely accessible, because as an educator it was clear that knowledge is power. 3. I know there is a lot of hidden talent out there that should be contributing to this mission. Our current institutions make it easy to overlook incredibly talented people, like many students I taught, if they don’t have the right degree or background 4. I am a deep believer in people’s potential for excellence and in the power of organizational culture. I saw how much more effective students were in schools with strong culture; I saw how much more effective teachers and leaders were when their managers trusted them, set sky high expectations for them, encouraged them to be authentic, and required them to solve problems outside the box.
How to use BreakevenQuantity to determine the quantity needed to reach target profit level
Quantity needed = (Profit desired / MP) + Qbe Target profit/profit per item + quantity needed to breakeven and start earning a profit
Estimate 6,300,000 / 55,000
115
Why did you study history and psychology
History: I was required to take a humanities course and so I chose American history, feeling a sense of obligation to better understand the country I lived in. The class was so different from my high school history experience and it really opened my eyes to how much I could learn by training to think like a historian. Unlike my high school class which simply required us to memorize stories the teacher told and to answer fact-based MC questions, in college I had to analyze dozens of primary sources to corroborate and challenge hypotheses about the past, to consider each document in the context it was written in to understand motivations, biases, and deeper meaning in language. I had to pit documents against each other to gain a fuller picture of what was happening at the time, and I had to weave together fact-based narratives that were persuasive in their carefully-crafted logic and in their precision and concision. I’ve always been deeply interested in understanding people and systems, and history gave me a useful way of learning more while developing critical thinking and communication skills I knew I’d need the rest of my life.
Psychology: I took an intro to psych course my first year, unaware of what psychology really meant, and I was hooked. I thoroughly enjoyed studying and critiquing creative research design and learning why humans think and act the way they do so I could better understand the world around me. I became truly passionate about psychology in my first social psych course when I began to understand how much people respond to their environment, and how the same person can act in totally different ways with small adjustments to their environment without realizing. I saw clearly how I could use intentional environmental and cultural design to get the best out of people, how to recognize and avoid cognitive biases and heuristics that cause people to make preventable mistakes, often tragically. Ever since, I’ve been passionate about organizational design, training, and behavioral economics.
Studies that fascinate me:
What do you do when you know you’re right, but the rest of the group disagrees with you? Do you bow to group pressure? In a series of famous experiments conducted during the 1950s, psychologist Solomon Asch demonstrated that people would give the wrong answer on a test in order to fit in with the rest of the group.
In Asch’s famous conformity experiments, people were shown a line and then asked to select the line of a matching length from a group of three. Asch also placed confederates in the group who would intentionally select the wrong lines. The results revealed that when other people picked the wrong line, participants were likely to conform and give the same answers as the rest of the group.
While we might like to believe that we would resist group pressure (especially when we know the group is wrong), Asch’s results revealed that people are surprisingly susceptible to conformity. Not only did Asch’s experiment teach us a great deal about the power of conformity, it also inspired a whole host of additional research on how people conform and obey, including Milgram’s infamous obedience experiments.
Books I’ve read:
Drive by Daniel Pink
Nudge - Richard Thaler
Thinking Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman
% of households that are homeowners in USA
66%
Estimate 78% x 36%
28.08%
Estimate Baseline: 5,000,000 CAGR: 10% Years: 3
6,655,000
Canada’s population
36M
Google 2 Minute Pitch
I’ve spent nine years leading change within schools; 1. first as a teacher, 2. then as an Assistant Principal, and then as an 3. operations and strategy leader. I started my career with Teach For America, working in one of the lowest performing high schools in North Carolina, where only 11% of students were reading at grade level, and where 99% of students were poor. Their hopelessness was tragic; they thought the best they could do was work at the local nail salon or Burger King. By influencing students, parents, janitors, and administrators, I was able to solve enough problems to lead my students to one of the highest growth rates on state exams in Carolina.
After a few more successful years in the classroom, I realized I wanted to expand my impact and learn transferable leadership, management, and problem-solving skills. Therefore, I moved into administration. I first managed history teachers in Newark. Then I was hired as an Assistant Principal by the top charter school network in the country to help design and launch their flagship high school. Later, I transitioned into more business-like roles, leading school operations and strategy.
In these roles, I was given several ambiguous problems that I had to creatively solve structure and solve. [Pause] For instance, at Success Academy, my principal said - “the 9th grade team is failing, I need you to fix it?” so I did. A year later, he said “students with disabilities are failing, I need you to fix it.” So I did. Then, at Uncommon Schools, our COO said “We need to open two new schools, figure out where they should be located?” So I did.
These projects changed my life [pause] I realized that I loved problem solving and strategy projects, and that I wanted to do similar work across a wide range of industries. However, I didn’t know anything about business, so I decided to get my MBA to learn a basic business toolkit.
Now I’m thrilled about the possibility of joining Google’s People Operations team for four major reasons: 1. I am passionate about technology and about Google in particular, given the impact of Google’s products on my life in education. For instance, I used Google Sheets to create tailor-made attendance trackers to ensure our students’ safety; I used Google Sites and Hangouts to overhaul our schoolwide communication systems, and we used Chromebooks to teach students how to do research and how to write college-level essays. 2. I am a deep believer in Google’s wider mission of making the world’s information widely accessible, because as an educator it was clear that knowledge is power. 3. I know there is a lot of hidden talent out there that should be contributing to this mission. Our current institutions make it easy to overlook incredibly talented people, like many students I taught, if they don’t have the right degree or background 4. I am a deep believer in people’s potential for excellence and in the power of organizational culture. I saw how much more effective students were in schools with strong culture; I saw how much more effective teachers and leaders were when their managers trusted them, set sky high expectations for them, encouraged them to be authentic, and required them to solve problems outside the box.
Estimate Baseline: 50,000 CAGR: 40% Years: 2
98,000
Estimate Baseline: 600,000,000 CAGR: 70% Years: 4
5,011,260,000
Estimate Baseline: 400,000 CAGR: 100% Years: 2
1,600,000
New York house of representative count
27 out of 435 –> about 6% (same as Florida)
Time about working in ambiguity
When I am working on a project with a lot of ambiguity, I actively fight the natural anxiety most people feel. I’ve tried multiple strategies, but the four that I’ve found most successful have been to:
- Shift my questioning about “what should I do” to “what could I do?” This makes a huge difference in reducing pressure, and opening up space for creative problem solving that often leads to critical insights.
- I change my context and my inputs, finding a balance between creating white space (time when I have no meaningful stimulation and my mind can wander and connect the dots for me, such as washing dishes or going on a walk) and reviewing a wide variety of materials without the pressure to find the perfect solution immediately.
- I change my inner dialogue to focus on how lucky I am to work on something challenging and meaningful. If there is a clear path forward, that would indicate my work isn’t pushing the boundary, and I’m grateful for the privilege to do work that makes a difference.
- I push myself to commit to the most likely to succeed action plan, and I carefully design the benchmarks at which I will assess progress and the metrics that I’ll use to assess whether my experiment is working. I make sure I methodically experiment and learn on the ground rather than getting caught up in the clouds for too long, which is my natural tendency if unchecked.
I honed this ability working on a leadership team that was designing and building a brand new high school model. We were actively designing a school we hoped to revolutionize what future high schools would look like. We rejected most popular beliefs about what schools have to look like, so every day there was a ton of ambiguity about how to proceed in our design and on-the-ground execution. For instance, I was promoted into a role in which I’d be managing our athletic director and our arts director. However, before I transitioned into this role my boss fired the athletic director and the arts director quit, and we were unable to find a strong enough candidate to hire. However, I still had responsibility for a vague outcome of ensuring that we had world class arts and athletic programming. I had no idea how to proceed - I had been put in my role because I had demonstrated success with managing managers across a wide variety of functions and the arts and athletic directors needed better management, but I didn’t know anything about their subject matter.
Tried to break down the problem into its component parts - there was a lack of vision for excellent arts and athletics programming, the traditional public school model teachers were never evaluated for students’ progress or skill development - as long as kids had fun and didn’t cause trouble, the teacher was given high ratings. I wanted teachers to work with the same level of urgency and accountability as history and math teachers, focusing on student outcomes rather than just the feel of their class. So I had teachers create 4-year sequences of in-school and out-of-school programming a student might take including clear skill and knowledge outcomes for each year, so we could measure progress and assess the efficacy of our experiments.
Estimate 640,000,000 / 6,800
94,118
Estimate 96% x 39%
37.44%
Strengths
Strength #1: I have great emotional self-control in stressful environments - I can remain calm, rationale, clearheaded, respectful, and strategic when involved in conflict. - Joel
Strength #2: I am great at taking people’s pie in the sky and half-baked ideas and transforming them into detailed and achievable implementation plans that are grounded in facts and analysis. I identify flaws in plans and analysis that most people miss, I analyze situations from various perspectives, and I anticipate surprises and complications. –> Kayla and SpEd plan
Strength #3: Analyzing data to find critical areas of improvement and leading teams to make this improvement. - 9th turnaround
Strength #1: I have great emotional self-control in stressful environments - I can remain calm, rationale, clearheaded, respectful, and strategic when involved in conflict.
Honed this strength when working in a chaotic classroom in a dysfunctional high school where kids would try to fight in class, would curse at me, try to walk out. I had to maintain my composure, give clear directions and consequences, instruct about complicated concepts in a clear way while correcting distractions. Learned to control my breathing, to challenge my own assumptions and instincts, decide what I want the outcome to be, and make a strategic move to get closer to my desired end result.
For instance, I was leading a turnaround of an underperforming 9th grade teaching team. At one stage, it was critical for all teachers on this team to check every students’ homework every day, by 3pm, so we could hold students accountable before they were dismissed.
One teacher on the team, Joel, was furious about this new requirement, especially because he thought we were adding an hour of work to his plate each day. His response was triggering for me. I wanted to assertively respond: “Don’t talk to me so aggressively, who do you think you are? And part of choosing to work in this school is accepting your obligation to do whatever is necessary to help our students succeed, even if it means working until midnight like I do every night.” Of course that would have been ineffective. So…
I took three deep breaths, then I asked myself what’s the most generous interpretation of why he’s acting like this and what does he need, I asked myself what do I want to get out of this interaction, and then I decided on my next move.
I started talking a bit more slowly to calm myself down and to de-escalate the situation. I said, “Joel, you seem upset about this. I understand that you think this requirement is going to add an hour of work for you each day. If I am able to prove to you that it doesn’t have to, will you give it a shot for a week and we can re-evaluate?” That gave me room to think quickly about ways for Joel to meet my requirements as efficiently as possible.
I literally walked around an empty classroom, pretending to talk to students, modeling for him how he could use a checklist on a clipboard with some pre-determined criteria to quickly assess the quality of student’s homework within the first five minutes of class as students did independent work. I then had him practice so I could coach him on how to be even more efficient and how to avoid pitfalls with the plan.
He bought in, realized how big of an impact this new routine had on his class, and became my biggest advocate. Many moments like these helped us transform a team and drive major results for students, leading to a doubling in the # off students who completed 100% of their homework each week.
Strength #2: I am great at taking people’s pie in the sky and half-baked ideas and transforming them into detailed and achievable implementation plans that are grounded in facts and analysis. I identify flaws in plans and analysis that most people miss, I analyze situations from various perspectives, and I anticipate surprises and complications.
For example, one of my teams was trying to radically improve the quality of our instruction and support for students with disabilities, because they were performing about 11% below the rest of the school. Kayla, the special education director, had good picture ideas, such as adding new classes, changing assistant principals’ KPIs and daily routines, and doing whole-staff trainings about how to improve their instruction. I worked closely with her to improve her draft implementation plan. We improved the sequence of interventions, we adjusted the plan based upon the perspectives and concerns we anticipated each stakeholder would have, and we revised the logistical details to avoid overloading teachers or students at certain parts of the day. This plan led to us closing the gap between students with disabilities and their non-disabled peers from 11% to 3%, making us the leader in the network of 40 schools.
Strength #3: Analyzing data to find critical areas of improvement and leading teams to make this improvement.
9th grade turnaround - noticed in my data analysis a need to provide students with a more consistent experience from class to class to improve homework completion rates and to reduce the number of escalated behavioral issues we faced.
Estimate Baseline: 400,000 CAGR: 100% Years: 5
12,800,000
India’s population
1.4B (same as China)
Estimate 40,000,000 / 1,200
33333
Google 2 Minute Pitch
I’ve spent nine years leading change within schools; 1. first as a teacher, 2. then as an Assistant Principal, and then as an 3. operations and strategy leader. I started my career with Teach For America, working in one of the lowest performing high schools in North Carolina, where only 11% of students were reading at grade level, and where 99% of students were poor. Their hopelessness was tragic; they thought the best they could do was work at the local nail salon or Burger King. By influencing students, parents, janitors, and administrators, I was able to solve enough problems to lead my students to one of the highest growth rates on state exams in Carolina.
After a few more successful years in the classroom, I realized I wanted to expand my impact and learn transferable leadership, management, and problem-solving skills. Therefore, I moved into administration. I first managed history teachers in Newark. Then I was hired as an Assistant Principal by the top charter school network in the country to help design and launch their flagship high school. Later, I transitioned into more business-like roles, leading school operations and strategy.
In these roles, I was given several ambiguous problems that I had to creatively solve structure and solve. [Pause] For instance, at Success Academy, my principal said - “the 9th grade team is failing, I need you to fix it?” so I did. A year later, he said “students with disabilities are failing, I need you to fix it.” So I did. Then, at Uncommon Schools, our COO said “We need to open two new schools, figure out where they should be located?” So I did.
These projects changed my life [pause] I realized that I loved problem solving and strategy projects, and that I wanted to do similar work across a wide range of industries. However, I didn’t know anything about business, so I decided to get my MBA to learn a basic business toolkit.
Now I’m thrilled about the possibility of joining Google’s People Operations team for four major reasons: 1. I am passionate about technology and about Google in particular, given the impact of Google’s products on my life in education. For instance, I used Google Sheets to create tailor-made attendance trackers to ensure our students’ safety; I used Google Sites and Hangouts to overhaul our schoolwide communication systems, and we used Chromebooks to teach students how to do research and how to write college-level essays. 2. I am a deep believer in Google’s wider mission of making the world’s information widely accessible, because as an educator it was clear that knowledge is power. 3. I know there is a lot of hidden talent out there that should be contributing to this mission. Our current institutions make it easy to overlook incredibly talented people, like many students I taught, if they don’t have the right degree or background 4. I am a deep believer in people’s potential for excellence and in the power of organizational culture. I saw how much more effective students were in schools with strong culture; I saw how much more effective teachers and leaders were when their managers trusted them, set sky high expectations for them, encouraged them to be authentic, and required them to solve problems outside the box.
Estimate 28% x 7%
1.96%
Estimate 48,000,000 / 1,400
34,286
Estimate 27,000 x 29,000
783,000,000
Ways to enter a new market
- Start from scratch and build in house
- Form a joint venture
- Acquire an existing player
What am I taking next semester (demonstrates interest in the job?)
–> Google, HC, Consulting
Power and Influence: To learn how to map power dynamics and politics in organizations, to learn how to gain and exert influence within an organization.
Beyond that, I’m intentionally stretching myself. If I did what was most enjoyable to me or easiest for me, I would take the dozens of management courses I am very excited by. Instead, I am thinking about the skills I will need to make a big impact and I’m taking courses that will make me more well-rounded and more capable of deriving actionable insights from large data sets - Business Analytics 2, Applied Regression Analysis. Econometrics for Modern Business, and a coding course in SQL to be able to access databases.
Additionally, Operations Strategy and Napoleon’s Glance, which is about strategic intuition.
Estimate 21% x 23%
4.83%
If we lower prices by 10%, how much does quantity have to increase for us to break even?
11.11% (1/9)
Estimate 39,000 x 93,000
3,627,000,000
Estimate Baseline: 20,000,000 CAGR: 85% Years: 5
433,399,731
Estimate 65% x 98%
63.70%
Tell me about a time you used quantitative skills, data modeling skills
I’ve done my most sophisticated quantitative work at business school, especially in business analytics. In that class we had to design simulations to optimize hotel bookings, we learned how to use excel functions to optimize investment portfolios, we learned how to measure the impact of experimental interventions in charter schools to control for the impact of luck, and we used logistic regressions to optimize spending on medical interventions.
I’m building upon this foundation this coming semester, taking rigorous quantitative electives such as Business Analytics II, Applied Regression Analysis, Econometrics for Modern Business, and Intro to Programming in SQL.
At work, I used a wide variety of data to create our COO’s geographic expansion strategy [see story above]
I also used quantitative analysis to study gaps in student performance to create action plans after each exam.
Ways to expand internationally
- Exporting
- Licensing
- Franchising
- Joint Venture
- Foreign direct investment (acquisition or startup)
If we lower prices by 50%, how much does quantity have to increase for us to break even?
100%
If we lower prices by 25%, how much does quantity have to increase for us to break even?
33.3%
Pressure test: “I was at Wharton yesterday and interviewed 10 candidates all of whom are more qualified than you…” - “You have a lot of accomplishments but nothing that qualifies you to be a consultant…” - How should I respond?
I respectfully disagree and I know I will be a great value-add for your firm.
My leadership and managerial experience far exceeds most people you’ve interviewed from MBA campuses, not only in terms of years but also in terms of quality and impact. I’ve helped build and lead some of the highest performing charter schools in the country, schools that are sending 100% of their students to college while our neighboring schools are sending only 50-60%. In the process I’ve exhibited the same skills you are looking for:
- I had to effectively build relationships with and influence a wide variety of stakeholders, from janitors to senior leader
- Effectively lead teams and manage projects to solve complex problems: I managed a team that led to 48% growth in achievement by students with disabilities. We analyzed multiple data sources to create a strategic plan that our CEO approved, and then retrained teachers and improved daily support systems.
- Design and implement strategies that have major business impact: I designed and executed a plan to integrate two schools by streamlining operations, communications, and data systems. My work reduced enough redundancies to provide our students seven additional teachers. Most recently, I developed our Chief Operating Officer’s strategy for new school locations by analyzing multiple data sets such as census data, school applications data, and school building occupancy rates.
- Act with high levels of ownership and initiative: While managing twelve direct reports across various functions, I took the initiative to design and implement our school’s first onboarding program, our first performance evaluation process, and a brand-new data management and communications system.
Estimate 37,800,000 / 63,000
600
An investment project requires an initial investment of $1M and will result in a profit of $10M in 8 years. The discount rate is 9%. What’s the NPV?
NPV = PV of profits - PV of Investment+costs
With discount rate of 9%, using “Rule of 69-72”, the investment will double in 8 years.
So the $10M profit 8 years from now is worth half today, or $5M.
So the NPV = 5M - 1M = 4M
Estimate 59% x 73%
43.07%
What do you do outside of school, not on your resume?
Live music and food and friends
Spend a lot of time doing informational interviews about pre-schools, interviewing school leaders and senior level leaders in supporting organizations, economists. Work with Appletree to help them determine whether to open in NYC, to craft their approach to potential partnerships, etc. Connect them with economists
Pressure test: “I was at Wharton yesterday and interviewed 10 candidates all of whom are more qualified than you…” - “You have a lot of accomplishments but nothing that qualifies you to be a consultant…” - How should I respond?
I respectfully disagree and I know I will be a great value-add for your firm.
My leadership and managerial experience far exceeds most people you’ve interviewed from MBA campuses, not only in terms of years but also in terms of quality and impact. I’ve helped build and lead some of the highest performing charter schools in the country, schools that are sending 100% of their students to college while our neighboring schools are sending only 50-60%. In the process I’ve exhibited the same skills you are looking for:
- I had to effectively build relationships with and influence a wide variety of stakeholders, from janitors to senior leader
- Effectively lead teams and manage projects to solve complex problems: I managed a team that led to 48% growth in achievement by students with disabilities. We analyzed multiple data sources to create a strategic plan that our CEO approved, and then retrained teachers and improved daily support systems.
- Design and implement strategies that have major business impact: I designed and executed a plan to integrate two schools by streamlining operations, communications, and data systems. My work reduced enough redundancies to provide our students seven additional teachers. Most recently, I developed our Chief Operating Officer’s strategy for new school locations by analyzing multiple data sets such as census data, school applications data, and school building occupancy rates.
- Act with high levels of ownership and initiative: While managing twelve direct reports across various functions, I took the initiative to design and implement our school’s first onboarding program, our first performance evaluation process, and a brand-new data management and communications system.
What are 5 adjectives that describe your interpersonal skills and communication style?
Direct
Steady
Great listener
Paraphrase a lot in order to ensure I understood correctly
Genuine
Breakeven formula
Profit = (MP*Q)-FC or Profit = (Price * Quantity) - (Variable Cost * Quantity) - FC Set profit = 0 BreakevenQuantity = FC / MP
Estimate 60% x 7,100,000
4,260,000
Resume story - book club
Book club focused on ethics and policy Ethics and the Real World -
“Which is more important, public health or private freedom?”
“Should we modify human genes to cure diseases?” (well-intentioned scientists with ethics will create a tool that they can’t control, will inevitably be used by someone with less noble purposes, such as creating a super-human military, tinkering with genes to get kid to be ivy-league ready…and once that happens, it starts an arms race and everyone else is going to be forced to do it too to keep up).
Life 3.0 - when we have artificial intelligence driving us, how does it decide when it’s about to run into a person what to do - should it hit the person ahead or swerve and hit a different group of people? What if directly ahead is one person that’s 99 years old and to her right is a group of pregnant mothers?
Quest for Cosmic Justice
21 Lessons for the 21st Century - Yuval Harrari (Sapiens, Homo Deus)
Winners Take All
Weapons of Math Destruction
Time anticipated business need for org and how I got ahead of it
Special Education - all my boss cared about was pleasing his boss with an efficient paperwork process for special ed. I realized that was a tiny part of the problem we ultimately had to solve. I found a way to do that process better than anyone else in the network. Then I moved on to the core of the issue, which was improving instruction. See SpEd story.
Brainstorm: Your client is a company that provides full-genome sequencing direct to consumers. It’s considering launching a platform that allows consumers to opt-in to a marketplace to sell their genetic data to researchers, biopharma and healthcare companies. The benefits are clear: consumers would be able to offset costs of the testing, allowing the firm to reach a wider consumer audience. In addition, it opens up a second lucrative revenue stream selling genetic data which could lead to important medical break-throughs. The path forward will be tough though and they’re looking for a well-versed third party to lay out all the key risks for them.
Data privacy: A customer’s genome (arguably the most personal of all data) could be stolen or leaked There is risk of researchers oversharing genetic data after purchased (e.g., gets inappropriately copied, etc.) Data misuse: Various healthcare companies might start acquiring data for purposes outside of medical research For example, insurance providers might improperly screen for pre-existing conditions Demand matching: Will there be enough demand? Will there be enough consumers interested in supplying genomic data? How will they kick-start the two-sided marketplace flywheel?
Google 2 Minute Pitch
I’ve spent nine years leading change within schools; 1. first as a teacher, 2. then as an Assistant Principal, and then as an 3. operations and strategy leader. I started my career with Teach For America, working in one of the lowest performing high schools in North Carolina, where only 11% of students were reading at grade level, and where 99% of students were poor. Their hopelessness was tragic; they thought the best they could do was work at the local nail salon or Burger King. By influencing students, parents, janitors, and administrators, I was able to solve enough problems to lead my students to one of the highest growth rates on state exams in Carolina.
After a few more successful years in the classroom, I realized I wanted to expand my impact and learn transferable leadership, management, and problem-solving skills. Therefore, I moved into administration. I first managed history teachers in Newark. Then I was hired as an Assistant Principal by the top charter school network in the country to help design and launch their flagship high school. Later, I transitioned into more business-like roles, leading school operations and strategy.
In these roles, I was given several ambiguous problems that I had to creatively solve structure and solve. [Pause] For instance, at Success Academy, my principal said - “the 9th grade team is failing, I need you to fix it?” so I did. A year later, he said “students with disabilities are failing, I need you to fix it.” So I did. Then, at Uncommon Schools, our COO said “We need to open two new schools, figure out where they should be located?” So I did.
These projects changed my life [pause] I realized that I loved problem solving and strategy projects, and that I wanted to do similar work across a wide range of industries. However, I didn’t know anything about business, so I decided to get my MBA to learn a basic business toolkit.
Now I’m thrilled about the possibility of joining Google’s People Operations team for four major reasons: 1. I am passionate about technology and about Google in particular, given the impact of Google’s products on my life in education. For instance, I used Google Sheets to create tailor-made attendance trackers to ensure our students’ safety; I used Google Sites and Hangouts to overhaul our schoolwide communication systems, and we used Chromebooks to teach students how to do research and how to write college-level essays. 2. I am a deep believer in Google’s wider mission of making the world’s information widely accessible, because as an educator it was clear that knowledge is power. 3. I know there is a lot of hidden talent out there that should be contributing to this mission. Our current institutions make it easy to overlook incredibly talented people, like many students I taught, if they don’t have the right degree or background 4. I am a deep believer in people’s potential for excellence and in the power of organizational culture. I saw how much more effective students were in schools with strong culture; I saw how much more effective teachers and leaders were when their managers trusted them, set sky high expectations for them, encouraged them to be authentic, and required them to solve problems outside the box.
EU’s population
500M
Estimate 25% x 95%
23.75%
Estimate Baseline: 400,000 CAGR: 5% Years: 3
463,050
Estimate 73% x 85%
62.05%
Tell me something unique about yourself
Wrote our wedding contract and ceremony, wrote and officiated friend’s wedding.
I have had meaningful relationships with people from a wide variety of backgrounds, giving me a very unique perspective on the world: Janitors in rural NC that are single mothers, Yemeni immigrant custodians, teachers in rural NC that are horribly racist, Singaporean millenials, first generation students from the rust belt, west african teenagers.
Estimate Baseline: 6,000,000 CAGR: 5% Years: 1
6,300,000
Estimate 16,000 x 400,000
6,400,000,000
Number of seats in the house of representatives (for market sizing purposes - percent of US population for key states)
435
If we increase prices by 25%, how much does quantity have to decrease for us to break even?
20%
$1.8B growing at 8% for 6 years will be worth?
2.7B
Estimate Baseline: 500,000,000 CAGR: 50% Years: 6
5,695,312,500
Estimate Baseline: 900,000 CAGR: 40% Years: 3
2,469,600
Estimate Baseline: 400,000 CAGR: 45% Years: 3
1,219,450
Weaknesses
Weakness #1 and what I’m doing about it: Fast Talking and Mumbling
Weakness #2: I’m too risk averse and overly analytical
Weakness #3: Initially come off as standoffish unless I’m careful
Weakness #4 and what I’m doing about it: I really struggle giving feedback that appropriately balances a focus on inputs and outputs. Still trying to figure out my leadership style and how to manage effectively.
Weakness #1 and what I’m doing about it: Fast Talking and Mumbling
Hopefully you don’t notice it right now, but I’m naturally a really fast speaker and a mumbler. I’ve had this issue since I was a child. I know it’s hard for some people to understand me if I am not very intentional about my pace and enunciation. However, doing so occupies a lot of cognitive resources and often causes me from sounding as natural and engaging as I do when I’m not focused on being more understandable. This means that when I am having a challenging conversation with someone and I need to be careful with my message, I often don’t sound a bit more robotic and less empathetic than I’d like.
What I’m doing about it:
I’m generally best at communicating when I’ve had a bit of time to prepare what I want to say, because then I can spend more of my cognitive resources on the delivery and not splitting between idea generation and delivery. So I try to prepare for meetings and presentations more than most people.
I’m taking improv classes to get better at thinking and communicating on the fly
Weakness #2: I’m too risk averse and overly analytical
I am often too risk averse and overly analytical about new ideas or situations. This can frustrate my colleagues for several reasons:
Many people have great ideas from intuition, and they get frustrated with me when I can’t buy-in without a more reasoned justification.
My risk aversion can easily prevent major breakthroughs or innovations.
My desire to seek out more and more information to ensure I get a decision right can cause stagnation.
What I’m doing about it:
I go out of my way when I work with new people to be transparent about my weaknesses. I find that in addition to helping build relationships through my vulnerability, this process helps people understand why I’m operating the way I am and they are able to respectfully push back on my when I’m falling into traps, even if they are my direct reports.
If I’m collaborating with someone on a task, I’ll tell them that I want to set a time limit for how long we spend on a particular aspect of the project to avoid stagnation of my own-creation.
I set timers for myself when I’m 50% of the way done with my time allotted for a task and I ask myself whether I’ll be better off with a more refined product or a finished product, and I adjust course
Weakness #3: Initially come off as standoffish unless I’m careful
At my last two jobs I received feedback that people I worked closely with loved working with me, but that I initially came across as a bit standoffish and hard to get to know. This really hurt me with people who deeply value relationship building at work, and I’m sure it made people feel less comfortable than I’d like them to be.
I think this might have been because of insecurity with my authority as a very new and young school leader and thought I should act in a more formal way.
I’ve really worked at fixing this at business school, since I have new opportunities almost every day to meet new people in a wide variety of settings.
I’ve made it a point to improve my ability to engage in small talk and relationship building in group settings at each event I’ve attended. I’ve practiced at nightly company presentations during the networking session, I practiced at all the orientation events, and I practice when I walk into a classroom ten minutes early and have an opportunity to get to know my classmates better.
I had to make a mindset shift, to drill home that it’s my job to be approachable, likeable, enthusiastic, and interested. I had to remind myself that I genuinely love learning about people, the work they do, the places they are from, and their passions. When I’m in the right mood I’m a great conversationalist, but I sometimes have to force myself to act that way when I’m not in the mood.
I’ve made drastic improvements - I got wonderful feedback from my learning team on this issue through surveys they filled out about me, I successfully networked to the point I got interviews at all but one consulting firm. I feel confident that hearing two different sets of colleagues give me similar feedback sunk in and I know this is an area to focus on whenever I enter a new group situation.
Weakness #4 and what I’m doing about it: I really struggle giving feedback that appropriately balances a focus on inputs and outputs. Still trying to figure out my leadership style and how to manage effectively. For the early part of my career, default was to coach, to encourage incremental and consistent growth by changing inputs, to overvalue inputs. This led people to focus too much on one way of doing the job and didn’t allow for as much autonomy as I would like my direct reports to have. In my most recent job, I shifted too much in the opposite direction. I was working in an environment in which my managers only cared about outcomes and their standards were incredibly high, to the point it was unlikely that anybody would ever reach their goals. I tried to mimic this approach with my direct reports, but I found myself having a hard time finding genuine praise on outcomes because nobody ever met the high bar we set. As a result, I worried I was beginning to exhaust my team as I focused too much on the gaps between the product and their gold standard without praising the improvements in their inputs that were beneficial for the school and that might keep them motivated.
I learned each approach working at two different organizations with opposite approaches to management. I fully bought-into each approach when I worked at their organization because I wanted to learn from their successes and give their methods a shot. Now I’m seeking out new ideas about how to blend the best of both approaches - I ask friends and classmates to tell me about their experiences at work, I’m reading leadership and management books, and I’m looking forward to learning from my next employer.
Resume story - food
Wontons in hot oil @ White Panda in Flushing
Pork dumplings at Little Pepper in College Point
Peter Pan and Moe’s Doughs in Greenpoint
Dough Hut in Long Beach, LI
Donuts before dinner and donuts at our wedding
BreakevenQuantity =
FC / MP
Estimate Baseline: 900,000,000 CAGR: 55% Years: 6
12,480,520,514
Estimate 64% x 21%
13.44%
Y1: +20%
Y2: + 30%
Overall Change?
+56%
Inverse proportions - give examples of formulas and the general rule
