Haas Dean Rich Lyons has instituted 4 defining principles, around which he’s reshaping the school. Areas like admission, curriculum, alumni relations are all being reconsidered in light of these principles. Haas is trying to think differently about what it means to be a business school. In fact, the school is getting some great press about the defining principles and the impact they're having – see this Financial Times article as an example.
The four principles are:
- Question the status quo
- Confidence without attitude
- Students always
- Beyond yourself
I was asked to give a talk last week at the 10th anniversary gala for the Berkeley Columbia program (of which I’m a grad). The theme of the conference piece of the BC MBA gala was on the Haas Guiding Principle “Students Always.”
I wasn’t quite sure how to approach this topic – but the one thought which came to mind was “do we have time in our lives to be students always?” So I decided to put together a short set of questions to get a sense of the level of chaos and distraction in our lives.
The results were quite interesting. I had 79 replies from a pool of around 500 graduates, so a good sample. In fact, I think it's reasonably indicative of mid-career professionals generally.
As a group, the Berkeley Columbia crew has a baseline of being professionally active:
- 85% of us commute to work
- Roughly half of us pretty much never get to take a nap
- 2/3 of us rarely veg out in front of the TV
But that’s not the entire story – our lives are not completely out of control:
- 85% of us get our oil changed pretty close to when the sticker tells us
- 91% of us generally show up for scheduled social activities
- 95% of don’t get many parking tickets (I get a lot!)
We also have the time to plan ahead:
- 2/3 of us eat-in at least 5 nights per week
- 75% of us have a meaningful portion of our clothes professionally cleaned
- Nearly ¾ of us plan ahead to attend a social activity at least every month or two
Lastly, we also don’t seem to have it all figured out – our lives are still open to possibilities:
- Over half of us don’t know exactly what we would do with a $1mm windfall (this was shocking to me! I’d blow through a mil in no time)
- 54% of us don’t have a will
- Nearly half of us, if we had it all to do over again, would have chosen a different career path
So, even though we’re busy, we have the capacity to take a bit of step back and be a disciplined observer of the world around us – we can be Students Always!
See the full presentation below (and a few thoughts on how to be a student always).
BCMBA Sept 2011 Students Always
The survey questions are here: Download 2011 BCMBA Gala Survey - Formstack
Go Bears!