Mini

Sitting next to this in the library. It's like someone took a shrink-
ray gun to this person's computer and mouse. Not sure if you can tell
how small the mouse actually is in the photo.

Bringing human to business

In our Ethics class, we've been talking a lot about working with a company rather than working for a company. The distinction is important, and related to the thought that there might be a trend toward employees choosing work that means something to them. Think of a Venn diagram: one circle is your personal life/values, and the other circle are your professional life/values. How much do they overlap? My Ethics professor and a good number of people who study these things (including Jim Collins) would say that employees increasingly want the circles to have heavy overlap. I can only speak from my personal experience - I have chosen deliberately to make these circles overlap as much as possible. I choose to work for a "social enterprise." But one thing I'm realizing is that working in a social enterprise isn't the only way to align personal values with work values. Not by a long shot.

One a-ha moment I've had in Ethics is that we can choose, either as employees (through choosing to work for this or that company), founders (by creating a company's mission, a la Whole Foods), or investors (investors voting for board members) - we can choose a company's stated values. If employees are interested more and more in bringing their humanity to the workplace, a company's values (what they are, and how assessable they are) become more important.

Here's a company that's very clear on their values - Herman Miller (they make furniture) - and a very cool video they put together on the type of employees they want to join them.

(side note: Johnson & Johnson is usually held up for being one of the most ethical big companies out there, but a recent event around not being forthright about risks of the birth control patch would indicate otherwise).

Kid doesn't want to go in the Auburn Store

Check out this video of a kid in Alabama who throws a tantrum when his mom threatens to "put him in the Auburn Store" in a Birmingham mall. Roll Tide.

Words

Courtesy of Geetha. Pretty cool.

Good thing about Durham

Good Durham, Good Durham. Last Friday I chilled at a sweet apartment owned my a married couple... friends of mine. They pay $1300 for two big rooms, sweet dining room and kitchen, and a killer backyard. Highly decorated in a quiet neighborhood. Contrast to

- San Francisco paying 900 a month (rent controlled) my own room, kitchen, sweet back porch, kickass location. Good value.

- DC in Kalorama. $1450/month for a 575ft^2 studio in a really nice building in Kalorama. Phenomenal neighborhood, but probably too much for what I need.

Tonight - went to a free show at the Duke Coffee House on East Campus. Very college-y. Very lively rock and roll with some college kids and blacklights. Loved it. Reminded me of crappy bars in Memphis with really good music. Also reminded me of the weather - nighttime in the South is sublime with the window down and the humidity gone. Just quiet outside, driving my trusty old acura from the coffee house back home to station nine. This feels right, and I could do this forever. This feels like home? Hold on, now. Maybe it does. Slow down and come back home to Durham? Yikes don't know what to think about that. It feels good, though, and I think I could make this work. Less stress. Community. The same people. Yeah.

Doin hood rat stuff with my friends

Rhodes Do Gooders

This makes me pretty proud (Rhodes College ranked #1 for promoting "doing good").

Full Day at Fuqua

Not every day is as busy as this one, but most come close:

7:30. Drive to Fuqua listening to Neil Young's Harvest Moon album. Eddie Vedder wants to be Neil Young, so I am going to listen to more Neil. Harvest Moon is pretty phenomenal.

8:00 - 10:15. Managerial Accounting class. I'm taking this class because of the professor, an Aussie who has been voted the favorite prof at Fuqua for the past two years. He has 210 students on the first day of class, and has already memorized each of their names and faces (he went down a row and nailed each of our names), and in many cases where we went to school, our backgrounds, etc. The class isn't as quantitative as I thought, which is good.

10:30 - 12:45. Ethics in Management class. I've been thinking a lot about ethics and leadership in the past year, and this class is somewhat of a capstone of that thinking. The professor is a very kind soul - at the beginning of class he went around and shook everyone's hand. He's an older guy and had worked mostly on Wall Street before coming to Fuqua a few years ago. The crux of the course is "can we separate our normal human selves from our business selves," how to create an ethical org. culture, self-reflection on our own values (we can say we're ethical, but being an ethical leader is hard - what will we do when the crucible moment comes?). Our next talk is on the purpose of business - to simply create wealth for shareholders, or is there a responsibility beyond the corporation (community, employees, etc.)? Ethics in business is becoming a hot topic as businesspeople learn that it's something that actually increases the value of its firm. There's a chart in Jim Collins' Good to Great that compares the growth of "values driven organizations" vs. organizations that purely seek profit without any core mission (i.e. the core mission is profit). The former companies dramatically outperform the latter. Anyway, as people realize this, ethics becomes much more relevant. One can argue that, taken this way, ethics are just another tool for making profit. However, there's a good argument to be made that people - humans - are realizing that they can't separate their working lives from their "normal, human lives." Having gone through a personal transformation of a similar kind, I tend to believe that others genuinely want to work for orgs that speak to a mission more than profit. Plus, turns out that it's good business to have an ethical compass. It's going to be a good class.

12:45 - 1:30. Lunch outside with friends. Nice day.

1:30 - 3:45. Forecasting class. I was falling asleep in the first half of class, so during the break got a coke. I've never really worked with pivot tables before, but we played around with them today and they're pretty powerful. The class is mostly about how to do regressions. It'll be dry, but it's material I want to learn.

4:00 - 5:30. Training to be a Management Communications TA. I'm looking forward to being a TA. I have to give feedback to the First Years on their presentations. I enjoy giving feedback. Some presentations will be horrendous, some will be good.

5:30 - 6:30. Free dinner sponsored by a Deloitte event. Get picture with Apollo Anton Ohno. Two damn good looking dudes.

6:30 - 8:45. COLE Fellows training. Last year I had some anxiety, to say the least. As a COLE Leadership Fellow, I thought I'd have a platform to push a "mental health agenda" at Fuqua. The premise was really simple: I knew a lot of my classmates who were extremely stressed out last year, and I wanted subsequent classes to be able to talk about managing stress, or to get professional help. So, I floated the idea of getting the Duke Counseling people to come and give the COLE Fellows training on how to help First Years deal with stress. The session went very very well, and it got a lot of people thinking about the issue. It wasn't a typical "here are the signs of stress" presentation. Rather, the psychologist went into the deeper reasons why we're feeling stress. I think all of us really related to what he said... it was very eye-opening.

Lesson: float a powerful idea, and people will make it happen. I simply proposed the idea of a training session and did some leg work to connect COLE with Duke Counseling. The power is in the idea - people really latched onto the need for this training, and it was fun to see how people would say "we totally need this type of training; we need to have these conversations", etc. It feels good to have driven this thing through.