“Always stay a student.”
— Frank Shamrock
The professor opened class with a simple statement.
“I assume everyone has the syllabus and all of the materials.”
Uh, I didn’t. I looked around the room and quickly ascertained that I was the only one. There was no sense in hiding.
I raised my hand to tell him. He wasn’t too annoyed. He simply said, “Open up Canvas and download it now, please.”
I said, “You got it,” but I thought, What the hell is ‘Canvas’?
The weather on the east coast is very hot and unbearably humid. My daughters like to play in the water and chase lightning bugs. We are in the midst of the summer. The calendar is about to flip to August. It sometimes feels normal.
But it’s not a normal summer. We’re all still living under a cloud of uncertainty and fear as an invisible, silent genocidal killer continues to haunt us.
And I haven’t had a complete day off since March 8th.
One question that COVID-19 has brought to the forefront of our societal conversations is, Who are the essential workers?
The first professions that immediately spring to mind are obvious: doctors, nurses, firefighters, police officers. However, the pandemic has proven that there are additional tiers and classes of essential workers, including grocery store employees, delivery drivers, warehouse employees, non-frontline healthcare employees, and teachers.
My wife and I are in these last two categories.
One of the perks of my job is that I am fortunate to sit in meetings with the leadership of the organization — President/CEO, COO, CFO, VP’s, fellow directors, managers, whomever.
In some ways, it feels like the NBA offseason is becoming more exciting than the actual season.
I was dying to work for a Fortune 500 company.
I began playing organized basketball at the age of six.
By the age of ten, I was playing year-round for various travel teams in various leagues, almost always in the age bracket above mine. There was never an offseason. Camps, practices, summer leagues, fall leagues, spring leagues, open gyms – I did it all. When state rules prevented us from holding official practices, we all met at our point guard’s home and conducted practices on the full court in his backyard.
Basketball was an everyday thing.
Another whirlwind year.
You can’t learn everything in school.
In fact, many of the greatest lessons are found outside of the classroom. As someone that went to graduate school (twice) and did get an MBA, I will not diminish it by saying that reading some books is the equivalent of completing a postgraduate degree. It’s not. I learned a great deal from reading case studies, listening to lectures, and engaging with my fellow students.
However, there there were some gaps that business school did not address.
To fill in those gaps, I turned to books.
