excited for mozilla

So Pamela and I had a great brainstorming session on Wednesday at Strada. Abel had done some background research since he was away in Europe, and Wednesday was the first time that more than one of the group was going to be on campus this week.

I could just tell it was going to be a good day. Our negotiations class had some really interesting discussion, our Game Theory group had just had a really excellent discussion and brainstorm about some ways to qualitatively and quantitatively think about and present our project, I'd had a good conversation with a first-year looking to make a career decision, and the coffee at Strada was great.

Pamela and I were really firing ideas well. In the spirit of the 6 Hats, we whiteboarded, talked about the data we'd ideally have, lightly critiqed other ideas, talked about the best possible scenarios, and got really creative. We didn't specifically set the use of the 6 Hats as part of the agenda, but it turned out that they gave great structure to the discussion, so we just kind of went with it. I think they were so powerful for a couple of reasons. First, Pamela and I had not done much work together in the past, and we didn't have a great sense of how the other would approach the challenge...this was kind of a risk-free model that gave us structure without having to tangibly set expectations. Second, I think we'd both been in SO many meetings and presentations where posturing and seniority rule the day as former consultants, and we wanted to use the freedom we'd been granted as MBA students to see how it would play out.

So, almost all of the ideas that we came up with seemed really legit, but the one we landed on seems really elegant in its simplicity. We had talked a lot about how to achieve social impact in addition to financial impact and market share, and we think we found a way to do it that really jibes with Mozilla's ethos and history. It's kind of cool - because of the great brainstorm, the familiar-but-not-intimate nature of Mozilla as a "client," and because they're here in the Bay Area, I'm more excited about this "little" assignment than I have been for anything else this semester, in any class. I hope all goes well with Asa and that he likes the quality of our thinking. The only shortcoming I can see is that we're kind of riding on coattails for the social impact piece, but it's less of a shortcoming and more of an opportunity to look at this as a starting point (after all we only have 2 minutes)!