Midway Through Term 2: Thoughts on Leadership Class

Whoa, I just realized that I am getting behind on blogging our class experience! There is so much going on these days (work, school, family) and it's been hard to keep up the blogging. So I figured that I'd write a bit this morning and upload a few pics before the events from the past few weeks faded from my memory.

Management 652, Foundations of Leadership, is a 0.5 unit class, and we finished up the lectures last weekend. Now we take a final the weekend after the upcoming one. It strikes me that this is definitely an "Extreme MBA", as in Extremely Fast! I can't believe it's over already. I thought that Professor Useem did an excellent job with the course, and I enjoyed it immensely. Here's the stuff we covered last weekend with my editorial comments, to give you a sense of what we do in class:

• Clarifying Objectives - We did a case study on the Parable of the Sadhu, which was about a dying Indian holy man in the most extreme of conditions. There was this 1960s video clip that we watched, which was kind of outdated but really hammered home the context of the case to me. A question to remember that struck me: what would you do if the sadhu had been a well-dressed Western woman?
• Leading in an Era of Change and Uncertainty - We covered a case study on Charles Schwab and Meg Whitman at eBay. The Schwab case was really cool because as soon as Useem put up the slide to start talking about it, our celebrity guest speaker for lunch showed up. The guest speaker? None other than Wharton alum Dave Pottruck, ex-CEO of Schwab and current CEO of Eos Airlines.

Here's a pic of Dave Pottruck addressing the class during lunch.

Click here for the link to Eos, which charges $5000 for a luxury plane ticket from New York to London! They market themselves as a "five star hotel with wings". Useem did the right thing and just chucked the material when Pottruck showed up in class. Who cares about a dusty outdated Harvard Business School case study when you have the real guy standing in class! I thought that Dave was kinda like an NFL football coach, aggressive and hard-nosed. I was thinking about Bill Cowher mixed with Mike Shanahan. I thought he was extra candid when it came to talking about some personal stuff and how your personal life affects your professional life; this caused him to change in order to grow. One of our classmates said, "Pottruck just oozes CEO....but I wouldn't want to work for him, he'd be too tough!"

• Acting Responsibly - There were case studies on Old City Enterprises and on Responsibility Yes, But To Whom? These cases were on ethical issues regarding one's personal reputation and the reputation of the firm.
• Making Rapid and Accurate Decisions - Useem wrote an article about the forest fire disaster on Storm King Mountain in Colorado in summer 1994 that claimed the lives of 14 firefighters. Our exercise in class was to make a decision about whether to race or not given some assumptions on the payoff and risks involved for professional auto-racing. This was pretty fun, as we had to split up into small discussion groups to make a decision, and then to come up with a group consensus across the entire section. Of course, as a faithful moblogger, I captured some pictures of this going on in class with my camera phone. Here's some pictures. There was a pretty funny moment in our section when Amir quipped, "What if the driver was a sadhu?"

WEMBA Section 2 debates whether to race or not. Sean modeled the expected utility of racing on the chalkboard.








Zia convinces Gary, Rob, Amir and Malika to race. "No guts no glory!" Amir was still wondering what if the driver was a sadhu....

• Building Leadership and Teamwork Before Needed - We finished up the class with some scenes from Gettysburg, where we studied the charisma and gravitas (oh no, I used the word, 10 yard penalty for me) behind the events that allowed the Union army to hold its crucial left flank. This was the turning point of the Civil War. Useem said that in the FT program that they actually go visit the site, and it made me wish that we could have done that too.
  

Some other stuff that happened last weekend:

• OPIM 621 Final. We took the OPIM 621 final, which is the other 0.5 unit class that is also done for this term. Hershey cranked up the difficulty level on the final compared to the last few years, but that was sort of expected given the clustered and skewed distribution on the quiz. This is the class that went by the fastest. I thought that learning Linear Programming and simulation techniques were useful tools that I will likely use in the future.
  
• Elective Selection Time. We got some additional info on the elective selection process as well as alumni feedback on their experience at WEMBA West. It is quite interesting right now, as there seems to be a lot of discussion and lobbying going on in the class to garner votes for electives of interest. We need to draw an influence map of the relationships in the class, and then to navigate the major centers of influence. I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
  
• Getting Sick. It sucks being sick, as I was last weekend. I think Raghav will agree with me. Sorry for those of you who had to hear me coughing; hope I didn't infect anyone. Wharton will record classes for you if you are really sick, but I think I made the right choice to go to class as there is no substitute for in class attendance. The good thing is that I got a ton of sleep on Friday night, having turned in about 9pm. Seems like something is going around now, at least in our study group....

-Chairman P