Havard Business School - Day 1

7 Sep -2009
Well I made it.
Got up this morning and went for a jog for about thirty minutes. The track alongside the Charles River is a beautiful tree lined one. I can't wait until the leaves start to change colour as autumn advances.
Went back to the hotel and checked out. Shared a cab over to Harvard Business School (HBS) with an Australian named Mark.
To say this place is impressive is a gross understatement, it it awesomely impressive. We were greeted by porters and checked in and processed with regimental like efficiency. From there we were shown to our rooms, given time to unpack, then we dropped our iPhones into get set-up so we can access the learning nexus.
Our first two lectures were on Case Preparation and Presenting in Class. Both were very useful.
Our first lunch was a big surprise IT WAS HEALTHY, something that is uncommon in America (in my experience), lots of salad and fruit and in case Breen reads this yes there was plenty of CHEESE.

After lunch we had an escorted tour of the HBS campus, which is equally impressive with all its Edwardian architecture. We were shown the health and fitness centre, which makes the Gisborne YMCA look very second rate. Without wanting to bore people with the details this place has everything. I am looking forward to using it.
The picture above is of the Harvard Rowing Club as seen across the Charles River from the HBS campus.
There is certainly going to be a lot of work to get through with 4 case studies per day for our learning groups to process and present each day.
There are about 160 people on the Advanced Management Program. I had a quick count up and they represent 45 countries. That's a lot of diversity.

And my room 51-8 is small but adequate, cute and cosy. It has its own bathroom, a good sized desk area, a desktop computer, about 1 million case studies to read!!, a single bed and nice views of the courtyard (would have preferred the river).

We had a session on technology that HBS provide that will assist participants during the course.

We then had drinks with the dean and then dinner, again pretty healthy.

We are all split into teams (working groups) of eight people, who have seperate rooms, but share a common kitchen, living and discussion area.
My team has representation from China, India, France (he lives in London), UK, Thailand, USA, Chile and obviously NZ (our group is entirely males which is perhaps not suprising as on the entire course of around 160 I would suspect there are perhaps a maximum of 10 females).
We sat around after dinner as a working group and had a discussion about who we are, what our expectations of the course are and agreed work patterns/schedules and limitations.