Tiny Desk Concerts

I just discovered these NPR Music "Tiny Desk Concerts." Great music played in a tiny NPR office. My favorites: Lost in the Trees, Phoenix, Tallest Man on Earth (though there are many others).

Painful Admission

I find this song hilarious and awesome.

Feel Good Fuqua

I'm studying for a Corporate Finance exam that I will not do well on tomorrow (though I'm actually enjoying taking my time and reading lecture notes/the book, although those things won't help me on the exam). Even with the time crunch, I feel the need to say: the people I've met at Fuqua - the class of 2011 - are some of the most inspirational yet down to earth and genuinely good people I've ever met. I'm very proud to be with a class that supports each other in the way that we do, and I feel strongly that these friends will last a long time.

Feel good story of the day.

Birbigs

I went to a Mike Birbiglia standup comedy show tonight. Got my picture taken (in the first photo he's asking me what my t-shirt means). Great show. What I noticed the most is how Birbigs is a very skilled storyteller. His routine is basically a 1.5 hour story with a bunch of side stories.

Glorious Me

Here's my bio on the Education Pioneers site. Here are the bios of everyone in the Bay Area Cohort.

Getting Corporate

Some of what I'm doing this week at Fuqua:

Through COLE, had a session with John Allison, the ex-CEO of BB&T Bank. Very impressive. 75% of his talk was about the importance of knowing your values, reflection, and leadership practice. If he were running business schools, he would take one whole year and teach leadership and ethics. He takes 2 weeks off each year to do something non-business-y, e.g. he'll go on a week-long workshop on philosophy. He also makes a point to read one serious non-fiction, non-business book a month... says there is tons of value in stepping outside what you know. This supports my observation that the best leaders are extremely well-read and well-rounded. The CEO also said his best quality is his honesty, especially with oneself. He's a huge believer in knowing your faults.

Guest lecture from the founders of Eurosport in my Entrepreneurial Finance class
Highlights:
- Founded by two brothers
- They went away to college and let their mom run the business, which she grew to revenues of $1M
- On the day of the US-Brazil World Cup game in 1994, they decided to switch their order taking systems. The new system didn't work and they weren't able to take orders correctly for 3 months. Had to send apology letters to all their customers to regain trust. Received one letter that said "I empathize with all of your technical difficulties. What I suggest is that you take a shotgun to your brother's head, and then shoot yourself. Please let me know when this has happened."
- It's really amazing how nobody realized how big the World Cup would be in 1994.
- The brothers admittedly "don't like business." They are in the business to support the soccer lifestyle.

This afternoon I'm going to a seminar with Duke's Muslim chaplain (one of only a few Muslim chaplains in the U.S.) to talk about Islam, business, and ethics. I interviewed Chaplain Antepli for my Ethics class, and he's a very interesting guy.

On Friday, I'm in a working group on Fuqua's career strategy. One of the participants is Michael Heisley, who is on Fuqua's Board of Visitors and the owner of the Memphis Grizzlies, among other things.

Also on Friday, I'm one of 10 pilot testers of a new class on Leadership in the Service Industry taught by Alan Schwartz, who is the ex-CEO of Bear Stearns (apparently he tried to save the company... he didn't cause their problems. I don't know).

Also, Rick Waggoner is teaching a class at Fuqua in the spring on "Corporate Crises." Pretty cool.

Education Press Roundup

Here are good education-related articles I've read recently:

How to fix our schools: A manifesto by Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee and other education leaders

Let's stop ignoring basic economic principles of supply and demand and focus on how we can establish a performance-driven culture in every American school -- a culture that rewards excellence, elevates the status of teachers and is positioned to help as many students as possible beat the odds. We need the best teacher for every child, and the best principal for every school. Of course, we must also do a better job of providing meaningful training for teachers who seek to improve, but let's stop pretending that everyone who goes into the classroom has the ability and temperament to lift our children to excellence.

Just as we must give teachers and schools the capability and flexibility to meet the needs of students, we must give parents a better portfolio of school choices. That starts with having the courage to replace or substantially restructure persistently low-performing schools that continuously fail our students. Closing a neighborhood school -- whether it's in Southeast D.C., Harlem, Denver or Chicago -- is a difficult decision that can be very emotional for a community. But no one ever said leadership is easy.

For the wealthiest among us, the crisis in public education may still seem like someone else's problem, because those families can afford to choose something better for their kids. But it's a problem for all of us -- until we fix our schools, we will never fix the nation's broader economic problems. Until we fix our schools, the gap between the haves and the have-nots will only grow wider and the United States will fall further behind the rest of the industrialized world in education, rendering the American dream a distant, elusive memory.

AV Club: Interview with Davis Guggenheim, director of Waiting for Superman

AVC: Was that intimidating? It’s such a vast problem.
DG: This thing almost destroyed me, it really did. There were days where I thought “I’ll never get this,” and the minute you think you’re onto something, something else contradicts it. The minute you think someone makes sense, someone else contradicts them. It’s a world where people devour each other, and destroy each others’ ideas, and almost stand on the sidelines and argue, which in its own way is part of the Blob: perpetuating the status quo, the educational elite that are constantly having a perpetual debate about things. So it’s like cutting through thickets of really smart people’s ideas with really nothing to grasp. And the things I felt myself drawn to were these pragmatists. I think you really can call it a revolution, these reformers.
These are people who say, “This is broken, this is ridiculous, I’m going to change the world in front of me.” So over here, Geoffrey Canada, over here, Michelle Rhee, over here, the KIPP guys. Hundreds of them, and they’re pragmatists, they’re not politically driven, they’re not ideologically driven, they’re pragmatists, and that’s what I think makes them win. This is hard work, but it’s not as complicated as you very smart people tell us it is. It’s about longer days and great teachers and hard work and changing the culture of a school, and that’s what so exciting now that wasn’t there 10 years ago. The sense that it’s possible.

Why Aren't our Teachers the Best and Brightest?

Dave's comment: the issue of teacher recruitment is incredibly complex, with lots of interdependencies on teacher evaluation, union contracts, the quality of teacher schools (vs. the quality of applicants). It is not an easy problem to solve.

These countries also foster a professional working environment. Finland, for example, grants teachers the kind of autonomy typically enjoyed by doctors in this country: They have wide latitude over how they teach, they share responsibility for their schools' operating budgets, and they belong to a culture that emphasizes the need to continually update one's skills.

In the United States, by contrast, teaching is often seen as an "unprofessional" career track, even by teachers. For example, we found that only 3 percent of the U.S. teachers we surveyed who were in the top third of their college class think that people who do well in teaching can advance professionally.

Crucially, these other countries provide competitive compensation. Of the three, South Korea puts the greatest emphasis on salary, with starting pay equivalent to about $55,000 and top salaries reaching $155,000. According to Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University, these earnings place South Korea's teachers somewhere between its engineers and its doctors. Singapore, in addition to competitive pay, offers retention bonuses of $10,000 to $36,000 every three to five years.

Life Lessons from Business School

In the spirit of my previous post (simple, yet profound lessons), here are two total game changers that I learned in business school (of all places).

- Attitude is everything. We've all heard this maxim before, but only recently have I seriously reflected on its meaning. I have two personal examples of how a positive attitude - and nothing more - made the difference between success and failure: persevering through chemo and surgeries, and picking myself up last year after a few months at Fuqua totally beat me down.
- Knowing your values. In my Leadership and Ethics classes, we went through a few reflections on our core values. Few activities have given me as much clarity. Knowing, reflecting upon, and acting on one's values has given me a powerful explanation of past behavior and a guide for future behavior. Game changer.

Coach K talking Leadership on MSNBC

Here's a video of Coach K on MSNBC. Check out the 3:45 mark, where he talks about his partnership with Fuqua and the COLE program.

I read Coach K's book "Leading with Heart" before coming to school, and thought that his lessons were a bit simplistic. However, as I study leadership and, more importantly, experience leadership, I find that Coach K's lessons are incredibly profound: communication (mainly eye-to-eye, 1-1 contact), trust, accountability, pride.

At the bama Tennessee game in Neyland Stadium