Harvard Business School Days 46 & 47

Thursday, 22 Oct 2009 and Friday, 23 Oct 2009
The last two days have passed by very quickly. Thursday night was notable because we ended up having impromptu party in our living group area. Neil was playing his guitar and he really is very good, knocking out a few classic 70s rock hits, with a particular passion for Eric Clapton. Along the way Wayne recited a Chinese opera number for us, which sounded nothing like Eric, but was polished non-the-less. The noise must have been heard in some adjacent living groups because in the space of about 30 minutes our 8 had turned into around 30 of us. There were a few tired looking people in class this morning.
Friday we had a lecture by Michael Porter (the guy in teh green tie with glasses) who is probably Harvard's most famous professor and apparently at one stage a few years ago was the world's second most expensive speaker behind Bill Clinton. Professor Porter gave a lecture on The Competitive Advantage of Nations, States and Regions. His big themes were understanding that the key metric was increasing productivity, which allowed higher wages and a higher standard of living to be obtained, on leveraging you natural endowments (e.g. resources like oil, or location like Singapore) and that it is hugely beneficial to create clusters. He spoke for about an hour and then took general questions for another half hour or so.
Steve my living group member (the guy without a tie, holding some leaves of paper wondering what Porter's name is) had the opportunity to introduce him, which he did well other than forgetting his name. I suspect we won't forget to remind him of that a few more times before we leave.

Friday night, following along on the previous weeks cultural evening theme, we had a kareoke night, which was a lot of fun and produced absolutely no tallent but a huge number of laughs. When the second person up is reasonably rotund a 6' 4' German banker and sings Almost Heaven in a way that only a mother could love (sorry Mike) it set the bar. But by God he set it low. It was a great night and I think the realisation that it will all be over in less than a week was one of the reasons that everyone just relaxed and had fun. The singing was on average awefull but the energy was massive. It was a fantatstic night.