A very long time ago I was diagnosed with severe depression – the type you hear about, and that if you’ve never experienced, you really haven’t a clue what it’s like. Being sad and breaking down into tears and crying for no real reason, sometimes not being able to get out of bed, lethargy, inability […]
(maybe not a very good one. I know how that sounds) Some years ago I had a flatmate who had these books by Iain Banks on his bookshelf. He kept telling me I had to read The Bridge, which was his favourite book of all time, so I kept waiting for him to get it […]
I’ve been thinking again, about grace as a combination of gratefulness and generosity. Not sure if it holds up, but I think there Generosity With our work at the Social Innovation Camp and Bethnal Green Ventures, we’ve found astoundingly generous people all over the world. From government workers willing to give up their time, […]
…with, perhaps, some lessons for most everything else. I went to the launch of my old dean Colin Mayer’s new book Firm Commitment a few days ago. I’ve just dipped into the book briefly but the associated lecture (and this article) got me thinking. The brief version of the lecture says, in essence, “The […]
At work we’ve been sitting on some excellent news since before Christmas: Bethnal Green Ventures, our for-profit accelerator programme, is going to be back in 2013, bigger and better than ever. What we’ll be doing, along with our partners the Cabinet Office, Nesta and Nominet Trust, is taking super early stage teams and giving them […]
Use who you are & what you’re good at in your teams Teams are groups that are cohesive. In most of the work you’ll do in business school, in work, and in life will require the assistance and aid of others. While I can build a financial model, there are others who can probably do […]
Figure out what you’re good at and be who you are. In strategy courses, we talk a lot about sustainable competitive advantage-what it is that makes your company better than others at doing what it is that you do-in some cases, you may have companies that compete in markets but don’t directly compete against each […]
You don’t get to make the rules; deal with it. This one you hopefully learned in undergrad, but it bears some repeating. You take a top international business programme which requires several years’ experience to get in and you’re quite likely to have a lot of talented people who are used to having their way […]
You don’t get to know the rules; deal with it. For most of my academic life, I had some idea of what the grading policy would be for my work-I always lost all the penmanship points, but got most of the rest of them. You could, of course, use this to game the system-you’d get […]
The most important lessons are learned, not taught. You can only be taught so much in life, but most of what’s important you’ll have to learn yourself. A lot of people were frustrated in our core Financial Reporting course-the accountants were upset that the course was teaching that their science was all tricks, smoke, and […]