"Yes, but how do you feel about leadership?"

.
A quick post, I hope.

I'm at school, in my group study room, supposedly doing industry research for our Industry Competitive Analysis project. We won the pharmaceuticals industry (hooray) and we now have a short window of time to figure out the industry, find a place that there might be an opportunity, and divine how to exploit that opportunity. According to the scant bit of research we've done thus far, last year Americans spent $200 billion on prescription drugs, so I suspect we're not the only people trying to figure out where to make a buck in this industry. Outsmarting them all and finding that hidden treasure is a bit of a tall order perhaps....

The latter half of this week has been interesting: we've just finished 'leadership development' week, wherein we spent all of Wednesday through Saturday doing various leadership exercises, supported/supervised by a clinical psychologist. Interesting stuff, to be sure. Our man, Michael Scott, is a "Principal Adult Pyschotherapist" in the UK NHS, has a private practice as well, also teaches and consults on organizational development, is an honorary senior lecturer in psychoanalytic studies at the University of Essex, etc. etc. etc. More amazingly, he sat almost completely still for four hours on Friday evening while we went around the room giving each person in our group three "helpful" and three "not so helpful" pieces of feedback! Yes, this is leadership development IMD-style. The whole shebang was actually quite good; I'm happy it's done, and I'm also happy to have done it. "Yes, but how do you feel about leadership?"

My favourite part of the leadership/feedback/pyschoanalytic stuff was how much people drank afterwards. The various sessions tailed off between 7 and 8pm on Friday, and by 8 or so there were at least 40 of the 90 people in our class at the local pub! The carousing continued long into the night, including a mass migration to a club downtown... when I went home at 2am there were still about 20 people going strong. My one conclusion from the night was made the next day, when I remembered that my tolerance for drink goes down when I don't imbibe for a few weeks.

Right then, back to the grind.

Ian