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Tag Archive for: university
What’s The Number One Class At The Stanford Graduate School of Business?
“Touchy Feely” Class at the Stanford Graduate School of Business has been the number one class for 45 years!
“Touchy Feely class” or interpersonal dynamics class at the Stanford Graduate School of Business was the number one class based on student voting for the past 45 years! Makes you wonder about what is taught in class, what students learn, and why students like it the most.
Could it be the real world impact a class like that has on these students? Or the complete avoidance of anything to do with emotions, love, and relationships in traditional business classes? The fact remains that understanding interpersonal relationships is one of the most valuable skills in 2017 and beyond. Ori and Rom Brafman believe is has to do with the most underrated characteristic in business, vulnerability.
Click: the magic of instant connections
I first read about Touchy Feely class in Ori Braffman’s book Click. The book is about the five principles that make people click. The first and most counterintuitive principle is vulnerability, the most underrate characteristic in business. You may have heard of Brené Brown’s The Power of Vulnerability, an amazing Ted talk on how opening up and leading with the heart is the most effective leadership tool. (PS: I like this talk of hers even better: Listening to Shame.
“Vulnerability is our most accurate measure of courage.” -Brené Brown
Maybe Stanford is on to something…
From Stanford’s website:
The ability to forge strong relationships with others is crucial to becoming a more effective manager in today’s complex, global, and highly interdependent organizations.
Technology can never replace authentic relationship building
It’ll enhance it, make it easier in come respects and more difficult in others. Technology has already changed the way we build, maintain and adapt to relationships but some things will never change. Trust, authenticity, humility, all matter No matter what changes about technology, the people behind the technology, developing it and using it still reply on human beings.
In business we rarely talk about how we’re building relationships, how we’re becoming a better team, how we’re becoming better people. But why the hell not? It’s the most important part of business. If you can’t figure out how to get along with other people it’s going to a long lonely life. People are number one, they always will be number one, no matter what technology comes along we will always have to know how to build relationships with other human beings.
How are you building your interpersonal relationship skills daily?
Stop telling people you believe in “relationship building” and “networking”, show people how are you practicing that regularly. Meeting new people, connecting with old friends, volunteering to make new friends, whatever your thing is, keep doing it! If you don’t have “a way” to grow your network, ask someone for advice, you need to start making it a priority. Start reaching out to people and connecting on whatever they want to talk about, be a good listener first. We are all learning how to communicate better, take as many opportunities as you can to be around, communicate with, and help people.
3 Reasons Why I Always Have Students Do “Real World” Projects In My Class
In our culture we tend to equate thinking and intellectual powers with success and achievement. In many ways, however, it is an emotional quality that separates those who master a field from the many who simply work at a job. –Robert Greene, Mastery
I’ve been teaching at a Sask Polytechnic for the past Four years and at a University if Regina for one. Since my second year I’ve always incorporated class projects that involve real world organizations, here’s why.
The back story…. I think I subconsciously want to teach using projects because the classes that included real works projects were the classes I found I learned the most in. Whether be Al Derges unconventional approach to the class or Lorne Schnel giving us real examples from the company he was running at the time. One of my favourite classes was one where we actually got to pitch an insurance company out of Toronto a new marketing strategy. I only remember that because our commercial was incredibly forward thinking and probably would have made them millions. Sadly they didn’t use the Idea. I didn’t care, I got to work on a real problem.
I had this idea of creating a learning moment by helping students “experience” entrepreneurship. By experience I obviously mean failing at something, learning, retrying, and succeeding. Here was the video I recorded before I started my first class project. Little did I know I was stumbling upon a gold mine of possibility!
Students need to work on real world problems, they learn more that way. At least that was my theory when I was in school, it holds true 10 years out. What an amazing conclusion!! The best way we learn inside or outside of school is by doing.
The “marketing apprenticeship” was born.
After your formal education, you enter the most critical phase in your life—a second, practical education known as The Apprenticeship. –Robert Greene, Mastery
My top three reasons why I always do a real world class project: Read more
I Would Do AnyThing For a Like But I Won’t Do That: Post-Secondary Social Media Marketing
When it comes to Social media don’t forget the social part of it. No one cares about you until you care about them. Engage, interact, retweet, like, and share. Help others and eventually they will help you.
People only go online for two reasons, to solve a problem or to entertain themselves, nothing else. Remember this when you’re publishing on your website and sending email.
Don’t tell people to like your institution, give people reason to like it.
Don’t tell people to follow you online, give people a reason to like you online.
Don’t tell people to share something, give people a reason to share what you are doing.
- Uplifting News The subreddit
- A great list of College/University people to follow on Instagram
- How is a bad radio station like the public school system? <–This is the podcast I mentioned that was about School of One the New York State Project. It’s definitely worth the listen!
A “Cribs” style video to showcase your school
Tell your story as to why you’re going to school
The best University/College Recruitment Video Ever
The Top 500 University/College/Research Institutions in Canada
How Do You Build a Visionary University?
You pick what you want to be known for.
Do you think the University of Florida cares about their academic performance? No, they don’t because they don’t need to. Their sports following for Basketball and Football is incredible and enough to give students a great reason to go there.
Do you want to go to the University of Pennsylvania (Wharton School of Business)? Do you want to play on their Basketball team? They haven’t won their division since 1979 and have never won the NCAA tournament. But that doesn’t matter, the only reason you’re going to Wharton is to get the best financial education money can buy.
“Standing out” is an underrated strategy when it comes to Universities and how to compete. That’s because it’s only up until now that they’ve never had to compete. The barrier to entry in to most higher level jobs in the past 20 years was a University degree or a comparable education. If you wanted a better job, you had to go to a post-secondary institution. Up until only 5-10 years ago, you didn’t have many choices of where to go to University. If you were from Regina you either went to the University of Saskatchewan or University of Regina, OK maybe Calgary or Edmonton (maybe Leftbridge, who knows). But why travel when you can go to your home town University?
But now you have to look across Canada and around the world because taking University from an institution away from home is going to be expensive either way. If your options are to move to Saskatoon or Dubai now you have an honest chance of attending the University of Dubai. (and next year it will be even easier)
Today your choices for post-secondary education have never been more abundant.
Education is free online. Want to learn about Consumer Neuroscience and Neuromarketing from Copenhagen Business School? Click the link and sign up for free. Or how about What Managers Can Learn From Philosophers from the University in Châtenay-Malabry, France. Yup, that ones free as well. Or how about What a Plant Knows (and other things you didn’t know about plants) from Telaviv University.
You can make the argument that the quality of online education can’t compete with in person lectures at any of the bricks and mortar degree granting institutions. Combine that with not being able to verify “who” wrote your final exam and the traditionalists may have a reason why we shouldn’t trust an online degree. Even if the quality isn’t there yet, it won’t be long before it is. Why wouldn’t you go online to get a more interesting lecture about a topic you care about more, taught by someone who’s more passionate about their craft?
What changed? Why is it getting more difficult for universities to compete?
1. More universities means more options for students
Today enough people are convocating and not finding the job they’re were promised, so why did we go to school, to get “smart” or to get a job?
Today, I can take almost any course I want online with an assortment of Universities to choose from. So why would I pick yours?
2. More graduates means more options to choose from: a degree doesn’t guarantee a job.
A lot of people go to post-secondary to get an “education”. That means something different to everyone so don’t start trying to define what “education” means, someone can argue the opposite point. Besides getting an “education” school in the past was very good at getting people jobs.
Did you get a job because you had the education? Or did you get the education because you had to get a job? How we approach the degree vs job debate really changes the way we approach how post-secondary should be administered and in the end how institutions will compete in the future.
3. Transparency is making it hard for people to hide behind the letters that come after their name.
If you convocated from a post-secondary institution in the past 10 years I bet you could recall at least one to two professors that well, to put it politely, were completely incompetent. Ten years ago you could fill out the form at the end of the semester and hopefully the administration and the professor read the feedback. Most likely they didn’t.
Even if you disagree with the student the fact of the matter is you can’t control what they say about you. Education will be held accountable.
Today, a Tweet, a Facebook post and a review on RateMyProfessor.com are the standard now. If you really good OR bad people will tell their friends, they will tell their friends, and alas, word-of-mouth remains the most powerful marketing tactic few organizations want admit to. The truth (or perceived truth) about a professor, program, or institution will spread like wildfire online.
Do you know what graduates are saying about your institution?