Dave

Author's details

Name: David Dworin
Date registered: September 6, 2006
URL: http://dworin.net
AIM: professordworin
Jabber / Google Talk: dworin@gmail.com

Latest posts

  1. Why do smart young people go into finance, law, and consulting? — February 9, 2012
  2. Supply Chain/Operations Case Study, Courtesy of Jim Henson — January 31, 2012
  3. Frogs and Pigs Can Talk, Penguins and Chickens Can’t — November 22, 2011
  4. How Elite Firms Hire — November 20, 2011
  5. Edward Luttwak on Strategy and Organizational Behavior — October 21, 2011

Most commented posts

  1. Where’d your blog go? — 1 comment

Author's posts listings

Feb
09

Why do smart young people go into finance, law, and consulting?

Categories:

by

The economists over at George Mason had a discussion this week about professional services firms (it looks like consulting especially, but not exclusively) that led them to try and answer two questions of interest to this blog: why do smart motivated young people join professional services firms, and why do firms hire consultants.  I’m going …

Continue reading »

This post has no tag

Leave comment

Jan
31

Supply Chain/Operations Case Study, Courtesy of Jim Henson

Categories:

by

How could a business case study get better than this?  Building on the previous two posts, as well as my other passions, this 1963 Bell Data case study features: A business consulting case (operations/supply chain/communications) A Jim Henson Muppet A robot Rocket ships A great example of each. Enjoy, via @RobotCity_Chi

This post has no tag

Leave comment

Nov
22

Frogs and Pigs Can Talk, Penguins and Chickens Can’t

Categories:

by

From a NYTimes piece on Bret McKenzie’s work writing songs for the new Muppet Movie: It’s a sacred endeavor because, to a certain generation, of which McKen­zie is part (he is 35), the Muppets are a found­ational part of childhood; writing a song for Kermit is a bit like writing a song for a blankie …

Continue reading »

This post has no tag

Leave comment

Nov
20

How Elite Firms Hire

Categories:

by

Bryan Caplan is linking to a new study that covers an oft-discussed, but poorly researched, area of professional services firm management: the actual hiring process at elite firms in law, finance, and consulting.  (The actual paper by Lauren Rivera, ”Ivies, Extracurriculars, and Exclusion“, Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 2011, is behind a paywall). Bryan outlines the five …

Continue reading »

This post has no tag

Leave comment

Oct
21

Edward Luttwak on Strategy and Organizational Behavior

Categories:

by

From this Tablet Interview, Edward Luttwak on Strategy: [Strategic thinking is] a gift like mathematics. The paradoxical logic of strategy contradicts the logic of everyday life, it goes against all normal definitions of intelligence we have. It only makes sense if you understand the dialectic And on styles of leadership and bureaucracy: But when such a …

Continue reading »

This post has no tag

Leave comment

Jun
04

Visualization: Surnames of Invitees to Nita’s Birthday

Categories:

by

This weekend, I’ll be attending a birthday party for my friend Nita.  Happy Birthday Nita!  To help her celebrate, I created the following graph of surnames found in her Evite:  

This post has no tag

Leave comment

Jun
03

Firm Culture

Categories:

by

Donus vs New Hires Over Time

In response to disturbing changes at my firm, I sent the following e-mail to our regional director of professional services: I’m growing increasingly worried about the culture at [Firm].  When I joined, I was led to believe that certain things were important here, but I’m starting to think that we’re losing some of what makes …

Continue reading »

This post has no tag

Leave comment

Mar
19

Electronic Maintenance Records

Categories:

by

From The Onion, “Quick Lube Shop Masters Electronic Record Keeping Six Years Before Medical Industry” “We figured that a basic database would help us with everything from scheduling regular appointments to predicting future lubrication requirements,” said the proprietor of the local oil-change shop, Karl Lemke, who has no special logistical or programming skills, and who …

Continue reading »

This post has no tag

Leave comment

Mar
07

Monitor Group Under Fire for Qaddafi Project

Categories:

by

Monitor Group, the top-tier strategy consulting firm, is in hot water for their relations to Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi, who is currently engaged in a brutal war of repression against his own people.  Mother Jones has the scoop on the project: But the firm also succeeded on other fronts. The two chief goals of the …

Continue reading »

This post has no tag

Leave comment

Mar
04

The Breast Ice Cream In Town

Categories:

by

Apologies for the pun, but it was hard not to. An ice cream parlour (you spell it that way on the other side of the pond) in the UK has had their new ice cream flavor confiscated by health authorities: The ice cream, dubbed Baby Gaga by maker Icecreamists, is made by combining a liter …

Continue reading »

This post has no tag

Leave comment

Feb
10

Changes in Top Law Firm Compensation

Categories:

by

The Wall Street Journal reports that the spread between the highest paid partners and their peers at top law firms is growing: Now some top rainmaker partners at firms in New York, Los Angeles, Washington and Chicago earn $10 million or more a year, compared with $640,000 for the average partner at a U.S. firm, …

Continue reading »

This post has no tag

Leave comment

Feb
09

The Professional Conspiracy

Categories:

by

From George Bernard Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma: Preface on Doctors: But the effect of this state of things is to make the medical profession a conspiracy to hide its own shortcomings. No doubt the same may be said of all professions. They are all conspiracies against the laity; and I do not suggest that the …

Continue reading »

This post has no tag

Leave comment

Jul
01

Ten Random Facts About Ice Cream

Categories:

by

Courtesy of my new book, The Science of Ice Cream, here are some facts about ice cream you may not know: Ice cream has been called “just about the most complex food colloid of all.”  A colloid is when a microscopic substance is evenly dispersed throughout another substance. In the case of ice cream, air …

Continue reading »

This post has no tag

Leave comment

Jun
28

An Up in the Air Moment

Categories:

by

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit. “Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.” “Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?” “It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes …

Continue reading »

This post has no tag

Leave comment

Jun
25

Where’d your blog go?

Categories:
  • Uncategorized

by

This is the first post in what I’m hoping will be a more frequently updated online presence.  I don’t know what the new blog will look like, but I’m fairly confident it’ll be different than the last iteration, which started when I was in graduate school, and radically different from my first blog, which garnered …

Continue reading »

This post has no tag

1 comment