They don’t teach you this in business school. But they’ll still give you an “A” for it.
The textbook teaches you how to draft a presentation. It doesn’t teach you how to deliver it. Here’s what happened in real life:
The MBA course focused on communications. It wasn’t a marketing course; it was a corporate governance course. The professor assigned a final project requiring us to form teams, with each team offering their presentation to the class.
We had a week to complete the presentation. It was the week I was away attending my company’s annual strategic planning meeting. I couldn’t help craft the presentation. This was OK. I was the only one on the team willing to give the presentation. I’d be back in time for that, but not back in time to rehearse.
One of my teammates didn’t like that. She was nervous about the grade. The other teammates apparently trusted me and let me go in front of the class.
I gave the performance you’d expect from a former AM disc jockey. It mentioned all the facts, but it was animated, entertaining, and completely different from what the class expected. My nervous teammate fumed.
The professor gave us an “A.”
Here’s the funny thing. I may have hit it out of the park in front of the large group, but if the Continue Reading “Are You A Promoter Or A Closer?”
Tourist Traps to Timeless Landscapes
We’d long left Chicago’s skyline behind for the flatlands. Of course, before the wide-open spaces, we traversed Wisconsin and Minnesota. It’s kind of arbitrary, but somehow poetic, to declare that crossing the Mississippi River truly makes you feel “out West” for the first time.
I-90 crosses the Mississippi on the Wisconsin-Minnesota border immediately south of Lake Onalaska. Yeah, they call it a lake, but it looks like it’s part of the river. Stretching 4 miles across, this is the widest span of the Mississippi River (if you include the Lake).
Oddly, crossing the Mississippi didn’t immediately scream “out West.” Instead, my brain went Continue Reading “Tourist Traps to Timeless Landscapes”