When a MBA Lecture is a Movie with Popcorn

Its 8 a.m. on a Cold Monday Morning in Sydney, Australia and I have no intention of leaving the coziness of my blanket for at least the next 2 hours, after all there has to be some advantage of being back in school.

I toss and turn in bed for the next 30 minutes trying to heed to the advice of the devil in me, “get your sleep and screw the class” is what it says. At 8:30 am however my conscience gets the better of me and sluggishly I let go of my one and only true love (sleeping).

As I begin to get ready I start thinking about what would be happening in class today. Chris Jackson, our OB lecturer always uses the most un-conventional methods of teaching. He taught us the art of understanding teams by simulating an F1 Pitstop in class.

He’s showed us advertisements and movie clips to get his message of Organizational culture and design across and then we’ve had classmates make presentations on certain units of the course. The Organizational behavior class has been a fine example of interactive learning, where in we learn not only from the lecturer and the course notes but also from classmates, movies and other things that we see in daily life.

As I start walking towards college, I begin to look forward to the class. What does Chris Jackson have in store for us today ? He said something about watching a movie called 12 Angry Men, so we would probably be watching a couple of movie clips again about the topics of the day viz. Leadership, Personality and Motivation.

I’m in class at 9:30 am and the first session starts. At 11:00 am Chris announces that the next 90 minutes would be used to sit back, relax and watch the movie 12 Angry Men. Wow, so we would actually be watching the whole movie with rounds of popcorn and chips going around the class. Now that’s something I didn’t expect when I woke up this morning and I am glad I didn’t listen to the devil.

12 Angry Men is a 1957 American drama film adapted from a play. Directed by Sidney Lumet, the film tells the story of a jury made up of 12 men as they deliberate the guilt or innocence of a defendant on the basis of reasonable doubt. The movie was great example of demonstrating different styles of leadership, ways of dealing with people having varying personalities and motivations and indicating the importance of avoiding “Group Think” in making team based decisions.

These were the points that Chris wished to drive home. The movie was also the basis for two class presentations that would be presented next week and would be based on learning’s from the movie.

Movie based teaching is apparently a highly effective method of making people learn and has been used to great effect in organizations as well. SBI (State Bank Of India) chairman, Om Prakash Bhatt apparently used this technique to turn around his organization from an ailing public sector bank to one of the country’s leading financial institutions when he showed the movie “The Legend Of Beggar Vance” to a conclave of 25 of the bank’s senior leaders and coupled it with stories from the Bhagvad gita to illustrate the problems plaguing the company.

As I walked back home after the end of the class, I realized how the MBA might be the only few courses in the world where a lecture would comprise of watching a whole movie in class and taking away a course concept at the end.

Soft Skills Or Harder Skills – First Weeks At AGSM

So you’ve been working in a particular role for a good organization for a couple of years and have enjoyed it. You’re probably working as a manager or you feel that you have the potential to become a manager. This leads you to start preparing for an MBA, a journey that is quite time consuming, expensive and very often a major step in one’s life and career.

What are the kind of expectations that a person normally has before starting an MBA Program. Lots of hard work, long days, multiple assignments, Banging your head over new subjects would probably be some of the notions that a person would have before beginning the program. Well, many of us here at AGSM, Sydney also had similar notions. But that was before the program started.

We would soon be completing about 2 weeks into the program and I can say without a doubt that if your objective in life is

1. To learn from people of different countries and cultures.
2. Explore and Appreciate Diversity.
3. Interact with people from different fields with varying degrees of experiences.

then the AGSM MBA and the AGSM experience would be perfect for you. Over the course of the past 2 weeks, we have learnt so much about ourselves and our class. At AGSM, you are taught that the first step towards becoming an effective manager is to know yourself and your team. The so called “soft skills” are actually “harder skills“, much harder Economics, Finance or Marketing, because the teach you the art of managing people. As any experienced professional who has lead teams, companies and projects would tell you, “if one can master the art of managing people“, then most things can be taken care of.

At the AGSM MBA, it’s all about enjoying the learning process and the company of your classmates. You can choose to take on the pressure of getting the best grades, but the system encourages you to place more stress on the learning than the grades.

The Desire To Be Superhuman – Understanding The Superman Syndrome

The picture above gives a classic representation of what our lives have become today as we strive to do more and more every day in our desire to become superior and more “super” than the rest. As we progress into the information age and technology becomes more widespread, people tend to be with their work for a major part of the day on weekdays and in some cases even on weekends. “For years, like legions of other professionals, Mr. Obama has been all but addicted to his BlackBerry. The device has rarely been far from his side — on most days, it was fastened to his belt — to provide a singular conduit to the outside world as the bubble around him grew tighter and tighter throughout his campaign“, says noted reporter Jeff Zeleny while writing for the New York Times (Check here). This just goes to show the kind of pressure today’s high-ranking professionals have to face and the rise of a little known mindset called the “The Superman Syndrome“.

“the Superman Syndrome is a dangerous workplace success formula that forces men and women to leap tall buildings and outrun speeding bullets — at the expense of personal lives, families, children and even business productivity. This represents a major hypocrisy implicit in nearly every boardroom in a lot of countries: The belief that we should be accountable to work but not to our families“. Superman Syndrome can exist in various forms, a person could work days and nights sacrificing his health and family commitments so that he can get the promotion that he desires or to get a better annual review on his performance so that he gets a better salary hike. Another form of the Superman Syndrome is one where a person tries to flash his wealth and take care of the needs of everyone around him. Take the case of Trent, who writes at The Simple Dollar.

“When I was freshly out of college with my first high-paying job, I would constantly insist on paying for everything. Meals out with friends, lattes at the coffee shop, even sometimes shopping purchases – I felt this deep need to step in, bust out my plastic, and say, “I’ll take care of it!”. It took many years, but I finally realized that I don’t need to be the financial hero all of the time – or even much of the time at all. Being the credit card-bearing Superman, like in that video below, doesn’t lead to being a hero – it leads to overspending, a sense of guilt, and a false image presented to others that you must keep up .

The Learning Fountain carries an interesting read of the Superman Syndrome here. It ends with a thought provoking line “Get a life. A real life, not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger house.”

Probably it doesn’t pay to be Superman everytime.