Parmigianino's Antea, in the U.S. for a short visit.

A celebrity of sorts has returned to the U.S. after a twenty year absence.

The Italian Renaissance painting Antea by Parmigianino (1503-1540) will be on short loan to the Frick Collection in New York City until April 27, 2008 after which time it will be returned to its home at the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples.

The Frick’s description of the painting is that Antea is depicted as “standing, looking out at the viewer with surprising frankness...As she meets our gaze, her pose and gestures create a dynamic of desire between herself and the viewer, who stands in for her lover.”

Fair enough, but Antea is also a grand mystery. I remember coming across Antea years ago in an art catalog and being fascinated by its story and all the surrounding speculation.

We don’t know the identity of the woman in the painting, her social status, or even why the work was commissioned. We can suspect she was of high status, but we can't be certain. (Courtesans of the time were adept at mimicking the appearance of high ranking women and crossing the class system.) We do know her name was not Antea. The name Antea was first used about 100 years after the portrait was painted and is a reference to a famous courtesan of Parmigianino’s time. Even the date of the work is not firmly established and is estimated to have been painted circa 1531 to 1534 which would have made Parmigianino about 30 years old at the time. (Could she have been Parmigianino's lover?)

Aside from the frank and direct gaze, the painting is strong on symbols. As the Frick's description mentions, the jewels and fur worn by Antea could be the wedding gifts of a new bride, or the gifts of a lover given in hopes of erotic attainment. By wearing them and interacting with the gifts (her hand points to her heart while fingering the chain) is she is accepting a lover’s offer? Or is she merely illustriously accepting her new role as a wife?

And while the depiction is suggestive of sexual tension, it has been argued that she lacks the brazen expression, disheveled hair and other clues used by Renaissance painters to portray courtesans and lovers. Instead we see dignity and pride of place.

In the end, each viewer is free to make his own conclusions.

Unfortunately, I will not be able to travel to New York before the painting is returned to Naples. But I post it here in case an interested reader has the opportunity visit The Frick Collection before then.

Visit the Frick Collection Site for more information- http://www.frick.org/

John P.

The Bane of Email, Two Tips on how to Manage Email

“I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.”
play King Richard II, William Shakespeare (dead English guy)

Email has become a bane in most of our professional lives.

We’re bombarded with email throughout the day and we sort through them in an attempt to figure out what is important and what is junk. As a result what was supposed to be a time enhancement has become a time quagmire.

Say the average time spend on each email is three minutes and you average 40 emails per day, that’s 2 hours spent on email. Now add the time for the daily phone calls we receive (and the shifts in priorities they bring), and you can see how quickly you can become time poor.

Here are two time management tips I’ve found helpful. The tips are a composite of various time management courses I've taken in my professional life.

First Tip, simplify your email to four basic responses-

1. Do it now- If the email needs a response and it will only take approximately two to five minutes, knock out the response as soon as you read it. If you don’t, you risk accumulating a mountain of email you have to respond to later in the week.

2. Decide When- If the email needs a response, but you can’t respond today, convert it to task and assign it to a specific day on your calendar. Don’t use our email as a task list.

3. Delegate/Distribute- Delegation, like intuition, is key trait to management & leadership. Train the people on your team and learn to trust them. Don’t try to do everything yourself. That’s a recipe for burn out and inefficiency.

On distributing the email, be careful here. Is the information really worth distributing? Don’t needlessly clutter other people’s mailboxes. I must get five “me-too” comments per day and they’re all annoying.

4. Delete- This has become my favorite response. Don’t save everything because of “just in case” anxiety. Your life will continue and the earth will continue to spin around the sun if you delete most of your email. If you really, really, have doubt, create a historical or archive folder and move grey-area email into it.

Back in the days of paper, I used to get my distribution/mail box full of stuff every day which I would carry back to my office. Once there, I would quickly glance at it and put in a tray. At the end of the week I would dump the tray into the trash can. My reasoning was that if it hadn’t bit me on my behind, or become important, by the end of the week, it wasn’t going to. That system served me well for several years. On those rare, rare, occasions when I did need something, the vendor who sent it, or a colleague could usually re-supply me the information.

Second Tip, email (by its very nature) turns you from proactive to reactive mode. Don’t begin your day with your inbox.

Begin your day by reviewing what your priorities are going to be that day, time allocated to fixed time tasks such as meeting or appointments, and your master task list. Decide what has to be done that day and what would be nice to do that day.

Since I do my planning based on a week unit, I also review this week and the following week to make sure nothing is about to blow up on me. This enables me to block out time on the calendar for what is important to me and prevents me from becoming time poor because I blindly reacted to other people’s priorities.

This planning also applies to what should be your main priorities in life: time with your family, worship, exercise, financial planning and true re-creation.

JP

(For related subject matter visit, “On Spam and Viruses, Part 1 and 2.”)

Whitman School iMBA, Syracuse

(Photo- iMBA January 2008 New Semester Reception. That's me at the food bar. "Food before you schmooze," that's my motto.)


I received a comment on the iMBA posting-
"Hi there-- I came across your site looking for information on Syracuse's iMBA program, as somebody who has decided to do an online MBA. Right now I’m seriously considering this program as my top choice, so I would love to hear about your views on the school's program as well as distance learning. If you have time to blog about this, it would be much appreciated! Thanks, Terry"


Terry,
Glad to be of help.

First of all the practical matters-
Time and Expenses- The tuition is going to run about $6,000 per semester (for two classes), plus books, plus airfare to the residency, plus hotel expenses, plus time away from work. The residencies are at the start of the semester and last about a week. You return to take your final exams and to start the following semester.

You’re looking at about three weeks of residencies per year; one in January (spring), one in May (summer), and one in August (fall). If you don’t want to attend the summer semester, you still have to go back for one day to take your final exams (usually on a Saturday).

The school recommends taking no more than two classes per semester (including summer sessions) which puts completion of the iMBA at three years. There is an open door policy between the iMBA and the full time MBA program, so students can transfer back and forth between the programs.

At present there are about 250 students in the iMBA program, and the Whitman School has decided to keep that number steady for now, which may mean admittance just got a little harder. At a reception this January, I asked an administrator what they were looking for as they tighten up admittance and she said diversity. She said they were looking for people from different parts of the country, and from different professions, in order to add value to student interaction with cohorts.

Most classes have group projects along with your individual assignments, and you’ll spend time coordinating these projects with your cohorts via email and conference calls. Some people are very active in expanding their networks via the iMBA program, others aren’t. On the first day back, the school normally holds a reception at the Sheraton for iMBA, and throughout the week there are additional chances to socialize with your peers.
For the most part, people in the iMBA are open and friendly.

The first semester, a new student is required to take Strategic Management and Financial Accounting. These two courses provide a foundation for the rest of the program.

Of the two, I found Financial Accounting to be the most helpful. In it, you cover how to read a balance sheet, and associated financial statements, with an emphasis on the cash flow statement for the final. With all the scandals today, the course emphasis is on compliance, and how to determine if a company is really making money and healthy. The course doesn’t really dwell on debits and credits, but on how to make sense of all the information and how the data can be manipulated by ethically challenged managers.

Strategic Management covers different business strategies common in business and the vocabulary required to discuss them. It involves case studies and group papers.

After these two initial courses, you are free to choose your courses based on availability.


Caveats-
The biggest caveat is the time commitment-
The residencies are time consuming and expensive. Not only do you fact the explicit cost of travel, but the implicit cost of time away from work. Make sure you have support from your company and direct report on this.

Then there's the change in your weekly schedule to accomodate study.
The best way to manage your study time is to knock it out first thing in the morning on a consistent basis, which means you should be prepared to log 5 hours minimum per week. And then plan to have concentrated time on the weekends, particularly just before assignments are due. I also catch reading time on airplane flights or lunches.

The last thing I'll mention is in the area of course enrollment. The courses fill up very quickly (enrollment is online). Fortunately the administrative staff is willing to work with you, and tries to juggle stuff around after the fact. The school is aware of it, and is working on issue. This enrollment issue is one of the main reasons they’re looking to keep the iMBA at its present student level.

On the plus side, there are different residency locations offered like London, France or the Bahamas. For example this May, there will be a residency in London which will cover the London Stock Exchange and Lloyd’s of London.

I hope this info helps.

John P.

(PS- For additional questions, a good point of contact at the school is Pamela Suzadail, Assistant Director of External Programs who can be reached at pjsuzada@syr.edu . The school's iMBA site is- http://whitman.syr.edu/MBA/iMBA/ .)