Love, at Harvard Business School, is hard to find, and harder to keep. To find enduring love is not to set your sights low but to make strategically crafted choices. Have you become myopically self-absorbed and romantically challenged since you joined HBS?
Whilst you wait to increase your bargaining power with advent of Class of 2009, Harbus is giving you a golden chance to check whether you have slaughtered your romantic forte during your transformational HBS expedition.
Do you qualify to be in the Mensa International of Romance? Well, here’s the test! You know you are running dangerously low on the HBS RQ (Romance Quotient) when:
1) You get your partner $100 crimson cash top-up for your first anniversary present.
2) You send out a pre-negotiation poll to your proposed date in order to understand the BATNA and ZOPA for the time-lag between the first date and sex.
3) You decide to have a first date in Spangler so that she uses her own crimson cash to pay for her meal.
4) You didn’t speak to your bf for two days after an argument over the term sheet negotiation exercise.
5) You utilize TOM concepts such as cycle time, throughput time and utilization to debate between Speed Dating vs. Traditional Dating.
6) You choose to celebrate your first wedding anniversary at a section drinking night at Daedelus.
7) You assess your potential significant other (SO) using the POCD framework.
8) Managing risk involves modifying and diversifying your exposure to opportunities in RC, EC, Law School, Kennedy School, Boston University etc.
9) You prioritize a pepperoni pizza slice from Pinocchio at 2 am over a promising rendezvous in your disorderly SFP apartment.
10) You think spending Valentines day revising for the Fin2 quiz is perfectly normal.
11) You refer to multiple dating as parallel processing.
12) You decide to cease emotional investment if your date fails the economic lens by not paying for the cab.
13) You send your long distance gf virtual flowery emoticons on her birthday (to demonstrate support for the Green Living program at HBS).
14) Your idea of a romantic getaway is a sixty person HBS trek to Colombia.
15) You start calculating your expected cost of Fin Distress if you have to wine and dine the woman for one month
16) Despite the cultural diversity at HBS, the only French you know is voulez vous couches avec moi, s’il vous plait?
17) You try to convince your date that Shakira’s my hips don’t lie and JT’s sexy back are evergreen romantic songs.
18) You would rather watch the edocs film in Aldrich 108 with your beau/ belle instead of catching a chick flick at Loews in Boston Common.
19) You think it’s quite reasonable to dump your gf/bf in Europe over skype or msn messenger.
20) You would rather have a passionate discussion over EC courses, Burden Hall Closure and dorm lottery results with your SO than a chat about your ‘future together’.
21) You meet more interesting people at VC/ PE panel/ club conferences than grad school mixers at Tommy Doyles.
22) Your last two exes sit next to each other in the same Aldrich classroom.
23) You think auctioning a date with your hot self is a first-rate method of raising money for the section charity.
24) You have wondered how you can utilize game theory to gauge the likelihood of a competitor’s move on a love interest.
25) To break off with someone, instead of using the traditional ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ line, you have told them that there was a ‘strategic misalignment of interests’.
26) You are excited about the Competitive Dynamics module in strategy because it will help you anticipate and prepare for the new market competition that will unfold with the incoming 09 class.
27) You refer to speed dating as exploiting economies of scale, scope and efficiency.
28) You assess the HBS dating market using five forces and the 5C Marketing framework.
29) When you have an argument with your SO, you blame it on market imperfections and information asymmetry.
30) You have discussed Sky Deck awards in bed.
31) You have tried to use valuation techniques like the Weighted Average Cost of Capital (WACC) and Adjusted Present Value (APV) to assess the time and monetary investments in dating, and to evaluate optionality in a setting of high Citi Assist loan leverage.
32) You use The Law of One Price to treat your romantic interests equitably: Two assets or projects that produce the same payoffs in all possible future states must have the same price.
33) You are bringing out your highlighters to color code and prioritize my list above.
