Julie the MBAlien

Tonight after class, a get-together at the Torch Club, a storied place with the portable coat racks ushed up near the roaring fireplace. MBAs gathered, and talked, all sponsored by the placement office. Perhaps we were meant to mingle with alumni? We were all new there.

In all, I mixed mostly with my own crowd, the Orange Core, Rick, and Alex Billy, Hannah, Rachel, and Mike, among others. A man from Moody's queried a man from Citibank; I identified the Pfizer mafia, and the Con Edison mafia. I talked about being an engineer, and not being an engineer, and arched a brow at my classmates who dismissed a video of Amy Tan discussing creativity - a process in he own life that has, like so many, been driven by loss and by asking questions.

We shuffled out, wine and beer ingested, a thick mingling of winter coats and scarves and hats, Blackberries and iPhones, plugged in, on the treadmill, mingling home.

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Change Management

My management class continues to really hit home in  ways that I never expected from an MBA class. For a class that focuses on high-level management strategies, it is remarkably personal.

This past week we discussed change management. When I first heard about this topic a few years ago, I imagined it in over-simplified terms based on m IT experience - print out some documentation, engage end users before the change, then walk around the floors and be prepared to answer questions about the new product. Hand-holding, we call it. You can make fun of it, but it's an important part of IT's role within the organization.

What I hadn't fully realized then was how much my background as a military brat has prepared me for the role of change management. I was living in Europe when the Berlin Wall was torn down, and that example is one that our instructor has used repeatedly. What do we do now, she asks, hypothetically, now that forty years of history are no more? The old way of doing things ist vorbei. We must find a new way forward in an unfamiliar landscape.

That was the background against which I graduated high school an entered college, and bearing witness to the transformational power of technology has always been rooted, for me, in the collapse of the Cold War.

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