Harvard Business School - Days 43 & 45

Monday, 19 Oct 2009 to Wednesday, 21 Oct 2009
The beginning of the week dawned and with it blue skies and sunshine once again, in stark contrast to the appalling weather of Sunday. Class continues to be engaging and interesting, but there is a real sense that the end is approaching rapidly. On Tuesday we had boxes delivered to our living groups for us to pack up, with international students boxes being dispatched on Monday next week. That was the first tangible sign that our self-centred existence of the last six and a half weeks is drawing to a close.
One of the things that I most enjoy about classes or through discussions with participants is being challenged to think about things in a different way, from a different perspective or indeed to consider issues with the benefit of new information . This YouTube video is an example Did You Know?
Tuesday nights (as I have said before) is rotation dinner night, so they mix up all the members in each living group and recombine them into groups of 8 or 9 that meet at a nominated living group and have dinner there. The concept is that it provides a mechanism to meet other participants and to share thoughts and ideas with a different group of people and in practice it works very well.
Neil and I ended up back in our living group area drinking port and watching Eddy Izzard and Monty Python videos on YouTube, quite possibly this wasn't the most constructive use of our time but it was most enjoyable.

Most nights we sit around as a living group and discuss the cases we have to prepare for class the next day. We try and achieve three things.

1. Develop a basic understanding of the case.
2. Work out what the key learnings or areas of specific interest are when applying the class curriculum to the case.
3. Share any personal insights or experiences that we have as individuals.

These sessions can go anywhere from about one hour to three hours. On top of this we have tried to allow time to discuss more broadly issues we have in our "other lives" and how we have thought through these issues while on the course and applied learnings as a way of understanding or addressing them. The photo is of Neil, myself and Philippe in one such living group discussion.