Day One at Harvard

I'm exhausted and it's only 9.30pm (which is very early by my standards).  It's been an amazing day.  As much as everyone has been saying to me "you must be so excited to be going to Harvard," to be honest I have somewhat been daunted by today's approaching date because of everything I had to do or organise before I got here.  Even when I arrived in Boston two days ago, there was still the pressure to read all of the cases and not a lot of time to wistfully contemplate this great opportunity. However, when my cab dropped me on campus at Harvard Business School today, tears welled in my eyes.  I think the full realisation of this tremendous opportunity finally had the time to hit me.  I looked around at the grand campus and the perfect blue sky and said to myself, "I'm at Harvard!"  WOW!  It is hard to believe.  As Annie said in the musical of the same name, "I think I'm gonna like it here!"

There are about sixty women in our cohort.  Amazing ladies.  Eight Australians.  Six Nigerians. Two each from the Bahamas, Belgium, Kenya, Japan and India. Twenty-three from the United States. Five from the United Kingdom and one each from China, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, The Netherlands, Vietnam, Israel and Jordan.  A multi-cultural group without doubt.

I had dinner with 2 ladies from Nigeria.  One of them has seven children and holds a senior position with a bank in Nigeria. (I was pleased to learn she has "lots of house help")  I sat next to the Head of St Aidans Anglican Girls School in Brisbane - we had to travel across the world to meet despite working within 15 minutes of each other.  On my right hand side was a Product Manager from JP Morgans in Chicago and a consultant from Ernst and Young in Calgary. Interesting dinner conversation to say the least.

Today's case studies were Oprah and Shackleton (a 20th Century Arctic Explorer).  Our facilitator Dr Nancy Koehn was intelligent, articulate, energetic, original and inspirational. She gave us a free copy of her latest book. The theme was leadership and some of  my key notes were:

• Entrepreneurship is the relentless pursuit of opportunity without regard for resources currently controlled. 
• Effective leaders are individuals who help us overcome the limitations of our own fears and weaknesses to do things that are harder and smarter than what we've done before.
• "Stop talking about what you're going to do and take the first step." Bill Clinton.
• How good am I at taking a candid inventory of my own strengths and weaknesses?
• How good am I at knowing what depletes me and taking action to avoid this?
• Doubt and fear in an organisation are the enemies of leadership. What sort of grade would I give myself on owning and marshalling the energy of my organisation - be it positive or negative?
• We learned from Shackleton that people need time to laugh.  Are my people having enough fun?
• Many great leaders display obsessive behaviours. When does obsession stop being productive and start being sick?
• Oprah shows us that there are benefits to being candid about our own vulnerabilities as leaders (in an appropriate way).
• Some of Shackleton's strengths that we can emulate as leaders include:
• optimism
• leading in spite of obstacles (and turning them into opportunities)
• determination
• eliciting buy-in from our team
• being flexible and adaptive
• assuming responsibility
• allowing compassion for our people to be a stronger driver than the pursuit of personal ambition.

We also had our first board of advisors meeting where we were grouped in four and assigned a coach for the week.  We will meet once a day for the rest of the week where each of us has prepared a challenge statement on one of the key challenges we are facing in our professional life.  Our board of advisors is there to help us develop an action plan to address this challenge. 

So to sum it up - day one was mentally stimulating, exciting, humbling, rewarding.

Now I need to get to work on some budget preparations for my real job and get to bed. 

Tomorrow's sessions run from 7.30am-8pm.  I think I'll need my rest.