failing forward?

Geez. If I had known that Genevieve was going to join us for class today, I would have made sure that our "Happiness in Mundane Places" presentation was done more professionally. Since it wasn't clear that it had any impact on our grade, and since we wanted to continue the pattern of using humor in class and basing it on Jennifer and other classmates, we made some stuff up and tried to have fun.

Sounded like the class was OK with it in general, but Genevieve did not like it because no real ethnography was done. Too bad it just wasn't of high quality like many others were, either. If I could do it over again, I would have used Glendale Arena, where the Phoenix Coyotes play, as a place where happiness is unlikely, and interviewed people there about how they deal with having a pretty unsuccessful team in a small market - things like coming to games with their grandkids, meeting the players at events, learning about the game, etc. That would have been much cooler, and totally do-able, because I was making videos anyway. Plus I could have gotten in some jabs about how it's not happiness to lose to the Red Wings every time.

But, I definitely think I got more out of this class as a result of getting knocked down by Genevieve. It made me pay hard attention to the other presentations and take her commentary on them to heart, because I actually happen to have a soft spot for doing ethnography - it was one of my key recommendations for Starbucks this summer (to do it in their stores so they could really understand customers in certain types of stores more deeply than they do today). I just didn't take this all that seriously because we were so wrapped up as a group in the other piece due today, and our strategy was simply not aligned with what a professional needed to say.

I was glad that Genevieve was so honest, and I am even more glad that she chose to make reference during her future comments to the parts of our presentation that she actually thought were good tactics, like playing on the Ratings and making fun of testimonials. I think if it had gone better, I might not have taken some of the learnings to heart. I just hate not getting things right the first time! But at some level it's what motivates me to do an ever-better job at stuff.

On the whole, I feel like classes are going pretty average as a result of simply having too much to do. The consulting project takes a huge amount of energy because it's a Fortune 15 company that I want to do a killer job with. Game Theory and Negotiations, for some strange reason, are a lot of work. I dunno...just seems that it's actually kind of hard to buy a house, turn 30, adjust to marriage, physically move into our new place, and feel happy about 100% of what I'm doing in school. I just don't get to some things because of the time I put into HP, but I'm only partially satisfied about the work we are doing there. No real valuable feedback from the client because Gary hasn't been involved.

Anyway...now I'm just complaining to get some of this off my back. Doesn't have a lot to do with creativity, except that I need to be more creative in order to get a better ROI on the time I am spending in my classes and doing assigned work. That's about mainly (a) the Yellow-Hat thing of using my "creative time" more to my advantage (tough because of wife's early wake-ups); (b) realizing that delegating is OK; (c) trying to stick to times I've set aside to do work, not falling into the trap of reading x or y online because it sounds interesting.

Never thought b-school would be as busy as life in consulting, but it sure is, and 2nd semester of 2nd year is no less work than last year at this time! I get what I signed up for!