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.