Looking Back - What A Long Way We Have Come!

When I first signed up for the class, to be honest, I wasn't sure how it was going to be. it's unlike most GSB classes - more artistic, more experiential, more free-form, and definitely less about spreadsheets. The speakers came and talked about their personal stories and experiences with social technologies. I was at first most concerned with whether I would learn tangible things from the class, as I would have in a class like "debt markets." :) The experience has been getting better and better as the course progressed and reached its climax, in my opinion, today. The visual presentations that all the teams showed were truly impressive. I loved how each story revolved around particular person(s) and emotions we can personally relate to.

I think what truly made this a special learning experience for me includes the following:
(1) Learn the art of storytelling. It's often an understated business skill. Just look at Steve Jobs, how he stages every Mac World product launch in a dramatic, and flawless fashion! Every successful business, especially a consumer business, requires great storytelling to engage its users. We are all human and have emotions. We "fall in love" with products, ideas, places, as we do with people. The best thing a business can achieve is to make its customers fall in love with its products or services - to connect at an emotional level. How do we do so? At the lower level, you can meet a checklist of requirements they ask for. However, the true experts in the area know to connect with their customers beyond meeting a laundry list of features. Apple doesn't make the most feature-rich product; instead it often provides fewer features. However, they make products that people simply love. They have a consistent image and character for all their various products, Steve is a master at telling you why Apple's products are better than any competitive solutions. Storytelling skill is particularly important in the new age of social networks, when people rely more on their friends' opinions and recommendations than an authority. People are wired to love stories, especially the ones told well. A great story can be organically spread, as we've seen in the growth of Kiva and many other successful ventures. What's great is to learn from some of the industry experts as we develop our own stories, from the technical director at Pixar to a producer from BBC. It's simply an amazing learning experience.
(2) Experiment. Just do it. This class has cost me the most time among all the classes I've taken this quarter, and is one of the most time-demanding classes at GSB. However, I had so much fun doing it, for the most part (except for an overnight battle learning Final Cut Pro). I would never have discovered how much I actually enjoy making short films! Frankly, I felt intimidated initially that I had to build a video story, after seeing what previous classes had done. I had never used those tools and didn't even know where to start. Now I'm really proud at what I was able to achieve within 2 months leveraging all the resources the class provides. We interviewed, wrote the script, picked the actor, shot the clips, and edited the video. The class' requirement for us to all roll up our sleeves and actually "produce" a visual story really forced us to start experimenting, and through the process, to learn deeply. Experiments offer active learning, which is the best way to learn. By making mistakes, you often learn more.
(3) Creative thinking. This is related to "storytelling", but I particularly enjoyed how this class exercised a different part of my brain. It's no longer just numbers, spreadsheets, analytical papers, or boring corporate powerpoint presentations. We still track numbers, like clickthroughs, signups, etc, but we also learned about human-centric design thinking. We learned to think creatively about engaging users. We learned to build stories that entertain people while naturally providing our value proposition. We learned to tell value than to sell. We learned to make viral videos. We tried different things. Some worked and some didn't, but we learned a great deal.

Looking back, I learned so much and will surely exercise it immediately!