Entrepreneurship Day

Jess brought us Entrepreneurship Day, when the Post-Its flowed like wine in a flurry of brainstorming activity.

We began with a Design Challenge: building a house of cards. Points were awarded for the number of cards in the house, and for the number of levels. All cards had to be from the same deck, so there was a mad flurry of bartering to try to collect as many cards as possible from the same deck. Early on, I realized that there was no award for height, and no definition for "level." So, our winning house was just a stack of cards, where each card made up its own level. We busily acted like we were trying to build a normal house to keep others from seeing our idea. Just minutes before the challenge ended, one of the other groups independently reached our method, and we ended up scoring the most points by just a slim margin.

We spent the rest of the day learning about the structure of the entrepreneurship curriculum, brainstorming possible ideas to make our lives on campus better, and throwing out ideas for potential student businesses. Jess' preferred brainstorming method, adopted from her former company IDEO, is to have everyone write ideas on Post-Its and stick them to the wall. Throughout training, our walls have been covered by conglomerations of pink, orange, yellow, and green Post-Its.

At one point we each took a business idea and fleshed it out. We created Hakuna Matata, a social outing organizer for expatriates aimed at creating cross-cultural opportunities. We pitched our idea to the class, complete with a role play and a performance of The Lion King song "Hakuna Matata."

Beyers Naude

I live off of Beyers Naude Road. As we traveled through the Apartheid Museum yesterday, I was surprised to see his name and picture come up - he was a pastor who took a strong anti-apartheid stance. Intrigued, I looked up his article on Wikipedia, and I found he was even more interesting than I had known.

Beyers Naude was an Afrikaner, the grandson of an Afrikaner general in the Anglo-Boer War. His father was a pastor and founder of the Broederbond, an Afrikaner secret society that was highly influential with the National Party and apartheid. Naude likewise became a pastor in the Dutch Reformed Church, joined the Broederbond, and justified apartheid through theology. But he began to question these justifications, and after the Sharpeville massacre he rejected them completely. He became an anti-apartheid activist, ultimately leaving his pastorship under pressure, and experiencing banning and imprisonment. He later became a pastor in the African affiliate of the Dutch Reformed Church, and when the African National Congress negotiated the transition to democracy in the 90's, he was the only Afrikaner in the delegation.

I feel honored to live on the street named after a man of such courage.

Writing Prompts

To give you a feel for what we've been doing here . . . for the last week we've been doing "Seminal Readings," looking at great texts on leadership and also texts which have shaped the history of ALA. For each one, we start with a 15-minute writing prompt, and I thought I'd share one with you. We were responding to a chapter from Daniel Pink's Whole New Mind, to the prompt, "Find a place where Pink uses imagery in the text. Describe the image and show how he uses it to support his point and contrast it." Here's my response:

Pink uses vivid negative imagery to describe GM exec Robert Lutz. This serves to put in more striking relief Lutz' embrace of art-focused thinking, which is prime evidence of Pink's groundswell of right-brain initiatives. Pink describes Lutz as "craggy, white-haired": you can picture the angular chin and sharp nose and broad shoulders (from his marine days). The marine image conjures up sounds of shouting drill sergeants. And then you can practically smell the smoke from his cigar, and the exhaust from his private jet, as he flits around the country in denial of global warming. All of this totals into someone you're not sure you'd want to work for, and certainly not someone you expect to be in line with Pink's ideals. But then you have his quote: "I see us being in the art business." You can imagine i said in a drill sergeant shout, emanating from nicotine-stained teeth through a cloud of cigar smoke . . . but the words are there nonetheless. From the most unlikely places, new creative-based thinking styles are coming to the fore. Pink's combination of unlikely examples - medical schools, Japan, GM - together give great force t his argument that "high-concept and high-touch aptitudes are moving from the periphery of our lives to the center."