Learn by Doing: Brand Battle in the Classroom

“I hear and I forget.  I see and I remember.  I do and I understand.”  － Confucius

We learn best by doing – ask any cricket coach; the only way you master a sport is by strapping on the pads and going to bat.

Of course there is value in reading and watching the game but with repetitive, unimaginative study too often those illustrative practices become little more than blunt weapons with which to beat any natural creative spark out of the student.

Education becomes little more than memorizing equations, formulae and concepts; regurgitate them in exams and valiantly keeping score.

And as we all know you can’t read the perfect game.

Involvement drives engagement; that’s why in my eight years as a Business School Professor I have become increasingly aware of the responsibility I have towards my students to prepare them for the world of business away from descriptive practices.

Conscious of the reality of the classroom, I teamed up with two progressively minded organizations, the Muthoot Group and Delhi Daredevils, to focus upon the problem of how to develop a novel experiential teaching tool.

Brand Battle Simulations took the practice of ‘war games’ a technique used by the US military to prepare their troops for the multiply eventualities of combat and applied it to the world of business.

As in a typical war game, student-teams take roles to simulate an unfolding crisis or gauge the possible reaction of competitors to a critical strategic move.

When recently teaching Brand Management, I invited the Directors of the Muthoot Group and the CMO of Delhi Daredevils to form control groups charged with presenting individual teams of up to ten MBA students with a scenario – imagined or real – about a current business crisis that they were then asked to solve.

With teams either playing the client, competition or a stakeholder I acted as the coach, guiding the student-teams to apply business theories, interpret secondary research, synthesize knowledge gleaned, and evaluate strategies.

Due to the nature of ‘play’ within a classroom environment, students felt free to think beyond the client brief to implement creative solutions to unforeseen problems while allowing clients to assess the relative strengths and weaknesses, threats and opportunities of their brand strategy.

‘Learn by Doing’ lectures make their apparent lack of formal planning their strength.  In this model, a language teacher could aid learning by getting his class to act out scenes from a play or a short story, a science teacher could demonstrate the flammable nature of hydrogen by showing its effects with a little washing up liquid and a match.

The only limit placed on learning is the limits of your imagination.

While ‘learn by doing’ lectures may be nonlinear and rigid, they are always coherent and surprising.  Beneath the seeming chaos in the classroom, there is always an underlying method that aids edification.

Like any good coach, educators are charged with getting the best from their students – to motivate and reward them through experiential teaching but too often our educational system stifles development with demonstrative pedagogic ideas.

The problems then left facing educators in this respect are familiar; students do not assimilate the necessary know-how and -why, and nor do they possess sufficient motivation to ask why these processes are critical to higher thinking.

The ominous problem remains; students know too much and do too little.

A growing self-awareness of the issue at hand has in effect crippled development in some of the premier business schools in the United States.

For instance, the Harvard Business School pioneered a case study approach to educating its students which attempted to tackle this malaise by fostering business education through a mix of theoretical reflection and deft application of the knowledge gained.

However, its modus operandi of promoting theoretical reflection became its primary value.  Students were still no closer to experiencing practical business situations.

It seems unimaginable that any other profession would prepare their students to enter the world of work without giving them the necessary practical tools in which to succeed.

After all, you wouldn’t trust a surgeon who had only perused elaborate case studies, discussed them in the classroom and written eloquently on the subject if he has no practical experience of the operating theatre.

‘Hear one, see one, do one,’ is an adage used by residents to learn a procedure.  In business education, however, the saying would be: “Hear one, talk about one, talk about another one.”

The reality is that what MBAs have to learn to be the managers of tomorrow they will have to do so within classrooms today – and how we are teaching them will only get them so far.

(Originally published by THE HINDU in Education Plus section on Monday, March 25, 2013)

Noteworthy Keynote Presentations

ONE OF THE least pleasant aspects of a professional’s job is the need to put things in a presentation format and present it.  Almost everyone finds it a chore and wishes he were better at it.  And many people are told specifically that they need to improve if they want to progress.  Look no further.  For a person who seeks to learn, I’ve put down seven important points below:

(1)  Use Pyramid Structure:

How do we remember telephone numbers?  We group them.  773-399-0773 (that’s my old Chicago telephone number!).  Any grouping of ideas is easier to comprehend if it arrives presorted into its pyramid.  This suggests that every slide should be deliberately structured to form a pyramid of ideas.

(2)  Need for Logic:

It is not enough simply to group ideas or bullets in a logical way in a slide without also stating to yourself what the logic of the relationship is.  This means that instead of remembering bullets, you remember bullet categories into which bullets fall.  As a presenter, you are thinking one level of abstraction higher, because thought-transfer is at a higher level.

(3)  Order Top Down:

Controlling the sequence in which you present your ideas is the single most important act necessary to presenting.  The clearest sequence is always to give the summarizing idea before you give the individual ideas being summarized.  And, the individual ideas better be well-thought to answer in advance any questions audience may have.  In other words, first the conclusion – like a newspaper headline – then the beef.

(4)  Create an Image to Recite Story:

Tell a story.  If you can’t tell, at least please do not orally state what is on the slide.  Audience can read on their own.

“Near the end of March 1845 I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my house, and began to cut down some tall, arrowy white pines, still in their youth, for timber..it was a pleasant hillside where I worked, covered with pine woods, through which I looked out on the pond, and a small open field in the woods where the pines and hickories were springing up.  The ice in the pond was not yet dissolved, though there were some open spaces, and it was all dark colored and saturated with water.”   - Henry David Thoreau                             

As you took Thoreau’s words, did you not build up a sort of mental picture in your mind, to which you added details as you took in successive phrases and sentences?  Malcolm Galdwell (“The Tipping Point,” “Blink”) is a persuasive orator.  In fact his presentation at SXSW 2005 is rated on par with Steven Jobs’ Mac introduction of 1984 or Gore’s emotive presentation of global warming.  People love Malcolm because he is a story teller.  He doesn’t lecture; he paints a picture.  With simple colors.  He does more with less.

(5)  The Power of Pause:

Even if you memorize your speech, force yourself to pause.  Never utter hmms and aahs.  Just pause.  It’s profound.  Even if you don’t lose your breath, please pause.  Even an ordinary address seems elegant with the power of pause.

(6)  Fail to Plan is Plan to Fail:

Mark Twain once said, “It takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.”  It makes sense to practice your presentation with a tape recorder and in front of a mirror.

(7)  Body Talks more than the Tongue:

Use your limbs as you modulate your tone.  Be passionate.  Stretch your limbs.  Ooze energy.  Get audience motivated.  Walk around.  Involve the audience.  Leave handouts.

Some remarkable discourses the world witnessed:

Guy Kawasaki, “The Art of the Start,” TiECon 2006

Steve Jobs, “Introduction of Macintosh,” 1984

Tom Peters, “A Ham Sandwich,” 1990

Dick Hardt, “Identity 2.0,” OSCON 2005

Hans Rosling, “Global Trends in Health and Economics,” TED Talk 2006

Transcendence to Consulting Mastery

Written with: Mary Sully de Luque

Good is to deliver a notch above to exist in a consulting firm; great is to go way beyond.  Mastery means own and empower along the way and all the way.

CONSULTING FIRMS are in the business of renting out brains; the most valuable asset in a consultancy is human capital.  Consequently, consulting firms scour top business schools for the best problem-solving brains, purposefully making the selection process emotionally and intellectually intense.  Once aboard, everyone around the consultant seems as a reflection of the consultant or scarily they may appear better qualified than the consultant.  And yet, six to ten years into consulting, only few transcend to thought leaders, empowering partners.

Arguably, attitude, brains, capability, and diligence give much comfort to function -  not mastery to perform consulting.  It is fallacious to assume the only goal of consulting is to provide advice toward solving problems, when the challenge most clients face is producing the strategic change itself.  To produce that change in a client organization, the inventories of theories, models, tools, and techniques are required but seldom adequate.

Good is the enemy of great.  Good consultants view that their work for clients ennobles them; masterful consultants, on the other hand, view themselves as ennoblers of their work to clients.  To elaborate the quantum difference between good and masterful consulting, let us consider two important aspects of management consulting:

(1)  Interaction at various levels with client organization

(2)  Creation and management of knowledge

No two business organizations are alike. Every organization has a culture, a pattern with which the entire organization views, believes, and grows.  Most organizations, however, can be compartmentalized into five, levels (as shown in figure above) based on structural power within the organization.  Consultants often interact at all the levels of a client organization.  Usually the executive management anticipated change to be brought about in their organization resulting in hiring a consultancy to seek advice, expertise, or validation.

Levels 1-3 are rarely embrace change because of functional inertia and unitary mindset driven through insecurities, intense competition with peers, reluctance to let go, and other human behavioral factors.  Consultants pursue, analyze, and articulate research, and collect the fee.  As change agents, however, masterful consultants build consensus as partners, not as experts with middle managers and team leaders of client organizations. Typically the progress and/or milestones of the consulting project are familiarized to the executive management (level 4,5) in steering committee meetings.  At such important meetings, masterful consultants create copious ownership opportunities for middle managers and team leaders, call it client-centered consulting.  The client-centered approach stands in shining contrast to other approaches which other consultants may adopt namely, consultant- or consultancy-centered, or strategy-centered, or task-centered approaches.  Client-centric consulting cannot be used in a piecemeal fashion to produce mastery; it is a shared responsibility, a committed interactive approach.  As the parent guides the child, the masterful consultant guides the client so that both own the process of change.  The consultant empowers the client to own the outcome, the change itself, in deeper levels of the organization enabling faster and smoother transition.  On the consulting side of the spectrum, masterful consultants may not be as sharp or current as new MBA hires, but they differentiate themselves in the way they hold, apply, and communicate knowledge.

The theories and models are tacit in the background of their awareness, but their explicit use of the knowledge to reveal simple patterns is holistic and systemic.  Masters don’t pretend or present themselves as knowers to answers, which itself is a humbling sight.  Instead they are empathetic curators creating the perfect platform to discover the outcome with their clients. Yet there is more to consulting than knowledge creation.  The problem is not the lack of knowledge, but the inability to act on the knowledge.  Masterful consultants do not merely relay the knowledge in the form of a keynote presentation or a report with charts and graphs; they go the distance to apply the knowledge and implement the change with the client.  Know what you know.  More importantly, know what you do not know.  Don’t give advice; just ask great probing questions.

Dr. Mary Sully de Luque, Ph.D. teaches courses in Leadership at the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, Arizona USA.  Earlier when she served as a post doctoral research fellow at the Wharton School with Dr. Robert House, Ph.D., she co-authored the seminal, ten-year research work, Culture, Leadership, and Organizations:  The GLOBE Study of 62 Countries. 

Subliminal Perception

Subliminal stimulation is defined as a sensory stimulus functioning below an individual’s threshold of conscious perception. Subliminal messages produce strong changes in behavior.

The use of subliminal techniques in retail outlets have been reported since the dawn of advertising. Grocery stores purposefully play classic rock to subliminally signal shoppers to rewind to their childhood days and implicitly urge them to purchase household products that their moms once used (curb switching of brands). Slow-paced music in supermarkets is often associated with more customers moving around at slower pace that may result in more time for purchase and trials boosting overall sales.

My friend, BZ (name concealed), a professional hypnotist and instructor at Silva Mind Control, helped me design an elaborate experiment with visual stimuli flashing at unobtrusive places on-campus to produce subliminal perception amongst student groups. When I teach Marketing Communications I often conduct this experiment to demonstrate how subliminal stimuli produce certain changes in the thinking or performance of student-led teams in assignments. MBA students across cultures, geographies, faiths, and races fall for it.

Marketers and advertisers who use techniques of subliminal perception are masters of psychological manipulation and control. Here’s a video clip featuring a professional mentalist and hypnotist who turns the tables on advertisers:

James Vicary superimposed two messages, “Drink Coca-Cola” and “Eat Popcorn,” for 1/3000 of a second every five seconds over a movie to report that Coke sales increased 58% and popcorn sales rose 18%. His experiment and results were published in magazines like, Nation, New Yorker, and Saturday Review. Vance Packard also dealt with Vicary’s experiments in his seminal book, Hidden Persuaders.

This Australian premier TV channel has recently rekindled the concerns of subliminal perception in advertising:

Click on the web link below for the ten best subliminal advertisements ever made:

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505123_162-42750795/the-10-best-subliminal-ads-ever-made

 

Boundless Ingenuity through Collaboration

The motto of my K-thru-12 school was “Knowledge is Power.” One could easily observe the school kids (at least those insecure top rankers) were so protective of their assignments and exams in an absurdly competitive academic environment in India where grades mean everything. Our world also teaches us about copyright, IP, etc. On the contrary, I’ve always been led to believe that knowledge on its own has only the potential to be powerful. Knowledge when shared becomes instantly powerful. Shouldn’t you teach a man how to fish? The power of collaborative web 2.0 technologies, open sourcing, crowd sourcing, and other pragmatic  methodologies have vastly enhanced knowledge and creative pathways. In today’s collaborative social world, if the marketer provides an opportunity for the consumer to participate, the marketer-consumer co-creation can be truly magical. Testimony attached.

My Statement of Teaching Philosophy

Every teacher was once a student, and so was I.  The philosophy of education I adopted in my eight-year teaching career was shaped by the twenty-five years I lived as a student.  As a student, I probably had a long list of qualities that made teachers great: preparedness, energy, mastery in subject matter, being organized, etc.  I had an English teacher who acted out a scene of the short story from the prescribed prose text; my physics teacher used to make steel balls fly in the laboratory experiments to demonstrate projectile motion.  Though it aroused the interest in the classroom, like many other students, I kept up with the learning in these two courses, but I did not chose to study English literature or pure sciences later in my life.  In my observations I found that many qualities which we normally attribute to superior teaching, though significant, does not necessarily correlate to inspiring students and promoting deeper learning.  This tentative statement delineates two pivotal attributes that contributed to my overwhelming success as a student, and how I today strive to contribute to this dyadic objective as an instructor.

Creating conducive environment:

I firmly believe creating a conducive environment is far more important than a list of preferred qualities a professor may possess to MBA student accomplishment and teacher success.  The talk, however engaging, should never be one-sided.  Making extensive use of a Socratic approach to teaching, I create a learning environment where my students are freely allowed to ask questions, and as a teacher, I aim to have a dialogue and a relationship with my students.  To either solve a case problem or elucidate a concept or theory, I’d like to break down into a series of questions, the answers to which gradually distill the answer a student would seek.

The mutual respect for everyone in the classroom provides a close-knit, family-like environment very conducive to learning, and in this nurturing realm, I strongly believe students will be enticed to burgeon.  I make a sincere effort to reduce the faculty-student distance by connecting with them over the social media outlets, chatting with them at their convenience instead of the firm office hours.  I even let my students to call me by my first name, if that will make them feel closer.  There are rules agreed by all students to follow, but I also give them the freedom to express their curiosity, passion, and creativity.  My lectures in marketing may not be linear and rigid, but it would be coherent – always delightfully surprising, and never condescending.  Beneath this seeming chaos and non linearity, there is always an underlying sequence and method that aids edification.

Inspiring MBAs:

I believe education is a life-long process.  Learning does not end on graduation day.  Even while pursuing a course, learning for students does not need to stop when the class is over.  As a student before and a teacher today, I’ve discovered that only when you inspire an audience they not only become overly attentive, but they are driven by an insatiable curiosity to know more, even after the class or course or program is over.  It is often said that a good teacher teaches; a great teacher inspires.  And, good is always an enemy of great.  The desire to stimulate other people’s curiosity about the subject the teacher teaches revolves around engaging students to new knowledge, interpreting the knowledge shared, and applying the knowledge created.  I have found that when students are taught with high rigor and when the knowledge is applied with high relevance, it adequately helps students to gain, retain, and use the knowledge imbibed.  Students of today live in a well-informed world; they need inspiration – not teaching.

I have taught in a wide variety of settings – online, boardrooms, lecture halls, and large auditoriums.  I have taught different audiences – undergraduate students, middle-level managers, full-time and executive-level MBA participants.  I have taught courses across geographies and cultures – the US, Singapore, India, Middle East to mention a few.  I have thereby experienced a multitude of cognitive styles presented by students in formal learning environment.  It is when the students feel my passion for the subject I am teaching, and the sheer delight to share, I find success in empowering students to learn.  It is my intention to continue along this pathway knowing that the journey is more important than the destination.  I believe as a teacher I can affect eternity, enlarge people in myriad ways besides the subject matter.