Precious Moments with Dr. Jane Douglas

One of the first assignments I completed for Dr. Jane Douglas' Professional Writing class was a personality test. I love those dang tests. I've probably taken 800 of them in my lifetime, and they continue to surprise me with accuracy. I remember one of the questions, "Do you prefer being alone or being with a group?" I picked the group answer, and shortly after, Myers-Briggs told me I was an extrovert. Well I'll be.

Dr. Jane Douglas laughs in the face of your stereotypical professor. She cusses, talks about Jesus and nuns, and wears fitted clothing my grandmother probably wouldn't appreciate, all in the name of tenure. I liked her style - Jane told you how it is. If your writing was crap, she'd let you know through "track changes" notes that read longer than your submission. If your writing was good, she'd tell you why your writing was good.

I was torn apart by her grading, which I liked. I'm not talking about 50-Shades-of-Grey-Torture-Weird-Stuff liked. I'm talking Mr-Miyagi-Teaching-Daniel-Son-Wax-On-Wax-off liked. I much prefer and benefit from a class where I get a B and learn a ton rather than a class where I get an A and felt like my time would have been more fruitful had I been cross-stitching Precious Moments scenes.

I write using "it" and "that" way too often, and Jane let me know those words are the devil. Of course, I would have known this if I had nuns for teachers in grade-school, but alas, my only editorial corrections over the last several years have come from Words with Friends.

Jane had us pick writing assignments that are of personal and professional interest - I picked the blog post assignments and the executive summary. The final is a group final, which sounds better than it is. Our assigned group was responsible for putting together one page of writing. We were writing an announcement to employees. Easy enough.

Jane gave some priceless advice before the final, "If this assignment collectively takes you longer than two hours, your paper is probably going to make me want to stab my eye with a sharp object." She was right - if your group didn't connect with the assignment right away, it would promise to be a long project that progressively loses quality from over-thinking. Our paper took five hours, and Jane now sports an eye-patch.

The night of the finals, Derrick, in his amazing event planning wisdom, got the class a stretch limo and a night at 101 Downtown, an urban, music-so-loud-you-have-to-yell type of place. Yah - the bottles of vodka came out with little sparklers attached to them. The bends from my final slowly and melodically turned into awkward dance moves and injured vocal chords. Our first term was officially over. And the next day, at 7:30am sharp, we'd be at it again, save for those who were a little too excited about those pretty sparklers.

Group Meetings and Thinking Too Much

Studying at home with a screaming toddler running around is problematic, to put it kindly. I remember one night, while preparing for my first team meeting, my little angel was sprinting across the living room in her expensive Seventh Generation diaper, shrieking at the top of her lungs. "What the heck is wrong with her?" I asked my frustrated and ready-to-explode wife. "She only wants to eat yogurt for dinner." I also thought I heard her mumble under her breathe, "I'd way rather be trying to figure out whether a risk-free-rate should be taken from a 20 or 10 year T-Bond than trying to feed a 13 month old peas."

My first call with my new teammates was long, as expected. Each group member wanted everyone else to know that they had read the cases, prepared for the meeting, and was really into this MBA thing. And when five people want to prove that they're awesome at life, you get a two hour meeting that ends where you started.

Due to my obsession with all things google, we did our first few meetings on a google+ video chat, we had dynamic google docs on our screens, collectively making notes (although sometimes I'd sneakishly write, "Dave is hot" in the middle of a long paragraph just to see if people were awake - God I hope we remembered to take those tidbits out of our cases), and we worked through gmail. As all of us were secretly wondering how google makes any money (who ever clicks the sponsored links?!), we got through our first meeting.

I went to the fridge to grab life's most amazing two dollar treat - Stonyfield Oikos Caramel Greek Yogurt. It's heaven, especially after two hours of looking at and listening to my new teammates. Don't get me wrong - I love my teammates. I really do. I just like my bed more. And I'm a people guy! Maybe if we were talking about how all of our days went at work instead of whether Nike's calculated cost of capital was accurate, I wouldn't have needed that little cup of incredible creamy goodness, but this night, I needed it. I needed it bad. And at 110 calories, my figure wouldn't even be compromised - win-win for everybody!

I went to bed and it was about 10:00pm, an hour past my pre UFMBA bedtime and 2 hours past my sit on the couch and watch Modern Family time. My wife was asleep in our King Sized West Elm bed (that we bought - including mattress - off of some good friends that recently moved to Seattle. Of course, everyone knows that buying used mattresses is kinda weird. And then I think about all of those nights I've spent at Hampton Inns on business trips, and how many people peed the bed, or did other things people only do when they're traveling. I remember hearing about a real winner who peed in an ice bucket at a hotel. This guy either felt so free from life's normal and repressive home constraints that he had to show off his autonomy by relieving himself in a cheap plastic bucket, or he had a lot of hot ladies he had to impress. Either way, this guy was super cool, and he's the reason I don't walk around bare foot in my hotel rooms).

Anyway, my wife was sleeping when I got to bed. I shut the lights off for her and grabbed my iPhone to catch up on all of the Draw Something games I was getting nudged on by Landon. While I was finger drawing a figure with a big dress and a pointy hat that looked more like a piece of cheese pizza on a demented person's head (how'd you guess - it's Gandalf!), I got to thinking about everything. Maybe it was those two cups of coffee my wife told me not to drink before the meeting, or maybe it was the mental stimulation from my new knowledgeable teammates. Who knows, but my mind was stirring like a spoon attacking some Arborio rice to craft creamy risotto.

I thought about technology, and how I can't even understand the mechanics of two cans connected by a string, transmitting voices through vibrations, let alone an iPhone that picks up my voice and invisibly and instantly moves it to my brother's house in Santa Cruz, CA - it's magic to me. I thought about politics, and I played in my mind the idea that if one of the presidential candidates used their campaign funds for something other than weightless and snakey ads, I bet the public might actually start trusting their judgment. "Probably not" I chuckled, but come on now - someone has got to be more creative than the current interruption marketing tactics these politicians so thoughtlessly distribute. I guess they're just indebted to too many contributors to actually think and act with any sense of freedom.

I thought about business, and why the heck I'm in business. You see, I'm a bit of a hippie, in thought and beards at least. I struggle with the notion that all corporations know what's best, because every working human being that isn't sleeping at work knows that the way to get to the top is to artfully pretend and present that you're better than you actually are. Perhaps I'm naive, but if a good portion of leaders at the top are just people who know how to talk, and not necessarily know how to think, analyze, criticize and question, then aren't many of our corporate decisions poorly made?

Are some companies led by people who have simply bulled their way to the top, sucked up to their superiors and nodded their heads to the quantitative? Are we less than we could be, say if we just poked the box a little more? And this is why I went back to school - I want to know what I'm talking about. I want to learn how to analyze and scrutinize data, people and especially the two working, and sometimes not-working, together. I want to learn how to lead and engage, not through artificial presentation, but through sincerity, knowledge and experience. Jeez - those two cups of coffee really sent me for a loop eh?

I put my iPhone down on the bedside table, turned onto my beer belly and put my arm around my sleeping beauty - this thinking stuff was making me tired.