For many people in the workplace, finance is a department shrouded in mystery. But finance affects each and every person in a company – it explains how their actions impact the company’s success, creates guidelines for the future, and sets meaningful metrics to determine performance. But what if you could see inside the mysteries of finance? How can understanding finance benefit you?

1. Learn how to analyze performance for your department

Finance gives you the tools you need to determine how well your department is performing, both by itself and as part of the greater company. Are you doing well? Who should you be compared to? What measures should you use for performance? Many companies choose the wrong metric for performance, or use the same metric for every department, and miss the unique ways in which each department contributes to corporate profits. A company that measures performance strictly in increased revenue targets, for example, may entirely miss the costs of increasing those targets (even as they may grow higher than the increased revenue!).

2. Interact better with your company's finance department

Many people think of their company's finance department as gatekeepers – a group primarily designed to say “no” to promising ideas. With the language of finance and an understanding of the factors they are considering, your finance department can become your partners, improving ideas and generating value-creating opportunities.

3. Unlock the true sources of value creation

Where does value come from? How do you improve your company’s worth to investors and the public? Is the project you’re working on actually making the company better off than if it were not done at all? Finance gives you the knowledge and the skills to answer these questions and to ensure that every project you take on will directly and meaningfully impact your company’s success.

4. Understand that actions tell stories

Everything that you or your company does tells a story that will be interpreted by someone else. What story are you telling? Are you accidentally sending a signal to your investors that hard times are coming? Or are you intentionally ensuring that your actions line up with your words and paint an accurate picture of the future of your company? In a world where investors must make guesses about what goes on inside a company, everything is analyzed – are you sending the right messages?

5. Appreciate the impact of your job

Ultimately, every position impacts the bottom line of a company. But how? It’s easy to see the impact that the Sales department may have on increasing revenues, but what about the IT department? Or accounting? Every department makes a measureable impact to the success of the company, and understanding the impact of your own job, using the tools of finance, can be the best first step to reaching a higher level of performance.

6. Understand investing and capital markets

Everyone interacts with capital markets, whether they know it or not. Your retirement fund is likely invested in a pension plan. Your personal investment portfolio is managed through a broker or packaged in a mutual fund. Finance can help you understand what makes a good investment – the places that can give your savings a secure and prosperous place to grow and multiply. Equally as important, it can show you what people are looking for in terms of investments and how your actions at your company can help to give it to them.

Finance doesn’t have to be a mystery. It can instead be the secret to your – and your company’s – success.

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Interested in gaining a toolkit for making smart financial decisions and the confidence to clearly communicate those decisions to key internal and external stakeholders?

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This is an excerpt of a post that originally appeared on Flarrio.

In my last post, I looked back some of the key lessons that have guided the development of HBX, the online learning platform of Harvard Business School, to date. So, what does the future hold?

Given how fast technologies change, are adopted, and abandoned, that’s difficult to say. That said, at HBX, we are actively trying to address several questions:

How Does Mobile Factor in to Our Strategy?

For example, how does online learning translate to a mobile device? Given the ubiquity of mobile phones and tablets, this is an area where the borrow/release principle will play in a big way. Trying to adapt the desktop platform completely to a mobile one may not be the best path forward for us.

However, there is much to borrow not only from our own platform and other mobile ones but from some of the technologies mobile devices offer. Geo-location is a wonderful example. How might this capability allow online learners to connect in person to form study groups or work on a project? The cameras on mobile equipment also suggest an opportunity. For example, could student-supplied videos and pictures augment a case discussion?

How Can New Technology Enhance Peer-to-Peer Interaction?

In addition to this work, we also are considering how peer-to-peer interaction in the context of a case activity might be facilitated through new technologies or adaptations of current ones. In the Harvard Business School’s negotiations course (offered in the on-campus MBA), students are asked to pair up and negotiate with each other after each is given information that allows them to take on the role of a principle in the negotiation. In the physical classroom this is easy. And certainly technologies exist online that would facilitate such a scenario in the virtual world (e.g. Skype).

But if we are to create a seamless experience for our learners conducting a negotiation exercise on our platform then it should be as easy as turning to the person next to you in a physical classroom. This is where the principle of student first comes in. What role could virtual reality (VR) play in this case? As more smart phones ship with VR goggles and full-featured goggles come to market, could students feel as if they were in a boardroom in New York City sitting across from a counterpart, negotiating a major merger? And even if they could, would this have value?

What Value Do These Technologies Add?

It is that question – would this have value? – that we must not lose sight of. Technology for technology’s sake is the express lane to irrelevance, poor learning outcomes, and user frustration. We must push boundaries, but not at the expense of students actually learning. This is our EdTech Hippocratic oath.

Immediately after graduating from college, I served four years in the US Air Force operating intelligence satellites. Inevitably, when I told people this is what I did, they asked, “Can you really read a license plate from orbit?” I was not allowed to answer, but I always turned the question around: “Why would you want to?” There are easier ways to track somebody and, in any case, the laws of physics don’t allow a satellite in low earth orbit to “hover” over a location despite what the movies show you (although this is something drones can now do). The message was this: just because technology can do something doesn’t mean there is efficacy in doing it. And this couldn’t be truer than in the digital education space.

I am confident that we will be surprised and amazed by how technology will revolutionize education in the years to come. I am also confident that some will use innovations even when they do little to further learning. But by focusing on student first, reinforcing community, and borrowing what works and releasing what doesn’t, we believe it’s possible to create a rich, immersive educational experience that stands the test of time … at least until somebody invents a Holodeck.   

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This is an excerpt of a post that originally appeared on Flarrio.

In the science fiction series Star Trek: Next Generation, many episodes featured a technology that used holographic tools to enable crewmembers to simulate various scenarios in a near-to-real-life way. The “Holodeck” immersed the user in artificial worlds that felt real, enabling quixotic escapes or serious training. As with many things in science fiction, Hollywood overshot what is currently possible (a necessary aspect of sci-fi to be sure). But also like many things in science fiction, the demonstrated technology hinted at tools to come and ways to use them. And as somebody who works in the education technology (EdTech) space, I can’t help but think of how such tools will drive the future of education.

I’m no savant with respect to where technology is going, but my experience as the Executive Director of Harvard Business School’s (HBS) digital education initiative, called HBX, has shown me that while hardware and software elegantly created and coupled can – and will – matter, it is the intersection of student, pedagogy and technology that really makes a difference. As we think about the use of even newer technologies to educate, it’s useful to consider how we approached using the Internet to deliver effective business education before turning to thoughts about the future.

It can be argued that the first “online” education in the United States took the form of public broadcasting from universities. Educational programs sprung up at numerous institutions in the 1920s that featured a professor lecturing to a microphone. Interestingly, this transfer of a known pedagogy to a new technology without considering the new technology’s capabilities and limitations was not very effective.

As researcher Paul Saettler noted, “the first years of [American] university broadcasting were generally ineffective because many a professor repeated his classroom lecture before the microphone without realizing that a good lecturer was not necessarily an effective broadcaster.” Early Internet instruction suffered the same flaw as many learned that just putting a lecture online did little to inspire and educate the students who received the message over the ether. 

Fortunately, for many of us in the EdTech space, others ventured to experiment in the online world when technologies and best practices regarding how to use them were nascent. Standing on the shoulder of these giants, those who got HBX off the ground were keenly aware of how technology alone wouldn’t make online education compelling based on several lessons from early participants in the EdTech space. Here are some of the key lessons we've learned so far:

Start with the Student

Put yourself in the student's chair and understand how the pedagogy will be executed in the new medium. At HBS, there was perhaps more focus on this than at other organizations since no standard platform had been built to support the method of instruction the school had used in its classrooms successfully for a century: the case method, an inductive, rather than deductive, form of instruction. Deductive learning is what most of us are familiar with. If you’ve sat in Chemistry 101 your freshman year of college, you likely experienced deductive learning: a lecturing professor explaining how to get to an answer through a formula or process. In deductive learning, students apply general principles to specific situations. It is this “lecturing professor” model of deductive learning that most permeated early online education efforts, perhaps because it was relatively easy to do.

By contrast, inductive learning forces students to “notice” concepts while working through a presented problem; students induce principles from general situations. This is the case method at its core. Putting the student at the center with the pedagogy in mind pointed us to building our own platform to ensure that the method of instruction would not be compromised. 

Cultivate an Engaged Community

Learning is better when students help each other, when there is a community aspect to their experience. In a physical HBS classroom, students aren’t asked to individually address the problem presented through the case, they are drawn into a discussion with their peers, debating each other and answering questions. This helps the inductive process develop and keeps student engaged. The power of peer learning is well known but to date has been infrequently used. In the book Make it Stick, The Science of Successful Learning, the authors note that peer instruction “engages the students in the underlying concepts of the … material; reveals students’ problems in reaching understanding; and provides opportunities for them to explain their understanding, receive feedback, and assess their learning compared to other students.”

So, when we built HBX CORe – a 150-hour credential course that teaches students economics, accounting, and data analytics – we ensured our course platform had rich interactive tools. HBX students can seek out help from their peers by asking a question that is tied to the content on the page they are studying. Likewise, they can answer questions members of their cohort have posted. They can view a live map showing which of their cohort peers are online and learn more about them. Each of these features helps students feel more connected to each other and engaged in the course material.

Adopt a Borrow/Release Mentality

This one may be counter-intuitive, especially given the earlier reference to replicating aspects of the classroom experience. We've adopted a mentality we call “borrow/release,” and it comes down to this: don’t try to recreate everything as it exists in the physical world. Rather, borrow the best of the other world and integrate it into the new, technology-enabled platform while letting go of things that just won’t work.

At HBX, we created a virtual classroom in a studio at Boston’s public television station, WGBH. As in the physical, tiered-seating amphitheater in a classroom at HBS, students are organized on a video “wall” four rows high. The professor can conduct a case discussion in a completely synchronous manner and allow students to debate each other and answer questions in real-time. It feels very much like being in a classroom and those who have participated are blown away by the realism of the experience. HBX Live is our education “Holodeck.”

But there are a few things lost in this version of the real thing. For example, students who are not talking directly to each other at the instructor’s invitation cannot really see the rest of their peers in class by scanning the “room.” Also, students can’t, in the middle of a session, be broken up into small groups in real-time to address some issue or come up with ideas and then immediately reconvene. We recognized these limitations and are comfortable that little is lost in giving these things up.

But there are aspects of HBX Live that best the physical classroom. Students can broadcast chats that appear in an electronic ticker along the bottom of the video wall. Professors have commented that this gives them a chance to get insight into what is on all students’ minds in an efficient way, something that is difficult to do in a classroom where only one person can be called on at a time. Using HBX live, it’s relatively easy for a professor to post a poll and get instant feedback from students, including from any number of observes who are not on the video wall but watching the classroom video and audio feed. And, of course, HBX Live collapses geographies, allowing sixty people from around the world to attend a case discussion without leaving the comfort of their home in Paris, Dehli, Los Angeles or Nairobi (for an example of how HBX works, see: BBC 4's The Global Philosopher). Try doing that from your grandfather’s classroom!

With the lessons of putting the student first, cultivating a community, and borrow/release front and center, we believe we have created a unique digital experience that our learners value. With course completion rates between 85% and 90% (most online courses are below 15%) and satisfaction scores that indicate users love their experience (particularly the community aspect of case learning), there is data to suggest we are on the right path. 

Continue on to part two of this blog post featuring Patrick's thoughts on the future of HBX and online learning.

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If you read the results of any type of study, you've likely been told that results are "significant" in at least some cases. Clickbait headlines may use the word "significance" to make readers think the finding is important. But significance and importance are two very different things.

What is statistical significance, again?

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Statistical Significance: A statistic is considered significant if the likelihood of it occurring by chance is less than a preselected significance level (often 0.05 or less).

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If you're in need of a more in-depth refresher, check out this helpful article from Harvard Business Review HERE.

How can you tell if a finding that is statistically significant is actually important? Here are three things to keep an eye out for.

1. Just because something is statistically significant does not mean that it isn't due to chance.

For example, if you tossed a coin 5 times, it is unlikely to come up heads all 5 times. There are 32 possible outcomes for tossing a coin 5 times and only one way to get 5 heads. So you'd only expect to get 5 heads one time out of 32 on average, or about 3% of the time. Generally, anything that would happen by chance less than 5% of the time is considered to be statistically significant. Thus, an unscrupulous researcher could get "significant" effects simply by conducting a lot of analyses and picking the ones that reach the threshold.

2. Just because something is not statistically significant doesn't mean that it isn't due to a real effect.

If one hundred people each tossed a fair coin 5 times, we'd expect 3 of them to get 5 heads in a row. Similarly, just because something is not statistically significant doesn't mean that it is due to chance. If a weighted coin that comes up heads 80% of the time is tossed 5 times, it may well come up 4 heads and 1 tail, a distribution that would happen 16% of the time by chance with a fair coin, so it would not reach statistical significance. Thus, an unscrupulous researcher could report "no effect" of something simply by conducting a study with a very small sample and little power to detect differences.

3. Just because something is statistically significant does not mean that it is practically significant.

When I was in graduate school, I fractured my navicular bone, a small bone in the wrist. My doctor told me that I could get a cast that stopped either right below my elbow, or one that continued past my elbow & would keep my arm bent until the cast came off. He informed me that medical research indicated that people spend (statistically) significantly longer in a cast if it stops below the elbow.

That certainly seemed like a good argument for getting a longer cast! But I asked for the average time spent in a cast under each condition. He told me that people who got the shorter cast spent, on average, a full six weeks in a cast while those who had their elbow immobile were out of the cast in only five weeks and six days! This may have been statistically significant, but the practical significance was not great enough for me to give up bending my elbow for a month and a half.

When you hear about a "significant" finding, you should take it with a grain of salt, especially if it's only seen in one study. A report about, say, chocolate significantly reducing the chance of hair loss (something I'm completely making up – I've never seen that particular claim), could be the result of either lots of analyses producing one statistically significant result by chance. Or it could be the result of a study that found a very small connection (for example, eating 5 pounds of chocolate a day would delay the onset of hair loss by 45 minutes), that happened to be unlikely due to chance.

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Interested in learning Financial Accounting, Business Analytics, and Economics for Managers?

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Sheneka Balogun is a Program Manager at Western Governors University who enrolled in the April 2015 cohort of HBX CORe in order to advance her career. She will be beginning an Ed.D. in Entrepreneurial Leadership at Johns Hopkins University School of Education this fall.

What do you do for work?

I am Program Manager in the College of Business at Western Governors University, one of the largest non-profit universities in the country that has been featured in Money Magazine, MSNBC, U.S. News, TIME, and even CNN for low-cost education that measures learning rather than seat time.

I performed consistently in the top 20% in the Mentoring Department and was promoted within a month of receiving my passing scores at HBX CORe.

Why did you decide to sign up for CORe?

I took CORe for several reasons. I wanted to advance in my career in higher education, and in order to do that I needed to better understand the core principles of business that would match my work ethic and high performance. I was eager to enroll in an MBA program and later pursue a terminal degree. Completing CORe, I thought, would position me to be a more competitive applicant during the admissions process.

What was your favorite part of the program?

Because there were so many facets of HBX CORe that I enjoyed and that were beneficial in me grasping an intricate understanding of the content, it's hard to single out just one part.

If I had to choose, I would say the interactive text throughout each module was my favorite part. Learning came to life! The videos from the professors, the interactive cold quizzes where you were randomly selected to participate (those gave me chills by the way!), the case studies that enhanced and often captured the essence of objectives and learning goals were all embedded in each module. This made learning fun, engaging, and student-friendly.

I think it's important to mention that the amount of support I felt during the CORe program was incredible! HBX CORe was much more than a tripod of rigorous courses. The sense of community that developed from all the various social platforms that were unique to HBX that provided me the platform to interact with other students from all over the world in various industries were instrumental in my application and understanding of the concepts.

See! I told ya it was hard to name just one favorite part!

How are you applying what you've learned in CORe?

At Western Governors University, measuring learning as opposed to seat time is at the core of what we do to improve student outcomes. As a Program Manager, I am constantly evaluating the current practices the College of Business, and even my individual team of graduate faculty have in place and seeking out innovative strategies that will reduce attrition, increase the number of graduates, and improve learning outcomes for our students.

"HBX CORe has provided me a dynamic understanding of how to measure and understand those outcomes. I can now confidently translate statistical data into a graphical presentation or employ different statistical techniques to help me better understand the pulse of student progress."

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The CORe community consists of a rich and diverse group of learners. Want to learn more about other students who've participated in the program?

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Have you ever walked into a store and wondered how they paid to fill it with products to sell? The easy answer might be, "with the money they made from the things they sold last month," and that's partially true, but what about for brand new stores? There's probably millions of dollars of inventory on the floor of many large retailers and hundreds of thousands of dollars of inventory on the floor of many small businesses. This working capital must be paid for - but how?

Many companies will take on debt to finance their inventories. Suppliers, eager to get business, will often offer credit terms, and each company decides how and when to take advantage of these through maintaining an Accounts Payable balance. This gap between paying for the products and receiving the money for selling them is called the cash conversion cycle.

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Cash Conversion Cycle: the amount of time that passes between when a company spends money to buy an item and when they receive the money for selling it.

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To calculate the cash conversion cycle, take the average number of days it takes to sell inventory, plus the average number of days it takes to receive payment for that sold inventory, minus the average number of days before paying for received inventory. In terms of accounting ratios, this is: 

Cash Conversion Cycle = Days Inventory + Days Receivables – Days Payables

A typical company receives inventory, pays later for that inventory, sells the inventory, then receives payment for it.

The implications of the cash conversion cycle are powerful. To illustrate with an example, imagine a company that buys t-shirts for $10 and sells them for $15 – a very simple business. If they have a cash conversion cycle of seven days, this implies that for one week they have lost the $10 needed to purchase each t-shirt but have not yet received the $15 for selling them. Where do they get money to buy more t-shirts and maintain their inventory? 

Financing this time through debt can impose a considerable cost on the company, especially for companies with very long cash conversion cycles. The longer the cash conversion cycle, the higher the interest paid on the debt.

Imagine a company that has a negative cash conversion cycle, like Amazon. By selling inventory quickly (low Days Inventory), receiving payment immediately for most sales (low Days Receivables) and putting off payment to suppliers for as long as possible (high Days Payables), their Cash Conversion Cycle is negative.

That means that Amazon actually gets paid for items they sell before they pay for them themselves. So, instead of paying interest to buy items for sale, they are receiving interest by holding cash in their bank account (or investing it in growing their company). This produces a powerful engine for cash generation and growth.

To learn more about the cash conversion cycles of Amazon and other organizations, take a look at this article from Forbes.

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Interested in learning more about accounting as well as analytics and economics?

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How many times have you been in a meeting at work or conversing with a colleague, listening intently, and then suddenly have no idea what the speaker is talking about? It’s as if the person started speaking another language.

This is a great example of The Curse of Knowledge (TCOK). What is this "curse" exactly? It's not the result of a magical incantation, but it can be just as deadly to a company’s health as an Avada Kedavra off the wand of a powerful wizard (where my Harry Potter fans at?). The term was coined by Professors Chip and Dan Heath in their book Made to Stick, to describe a situation in which experts are unable to communicate their ideas to novices because they have forgotten what it’s like to be unfamiliar with their area of interest. But TCOK also exists in other fields—from professors that excel in their research but fail to teach basic concepts effectively, to scientists that struggle to communicate their findings to the public.

I had my own experience with TCOK recently at HBX. It occurred while recording an interview for one of our new courses in development (more details on such courses coming soon!). After I finished asking a question to the interviewee, red lights on our two cameras suddenly began flashing.

“Hey Pat,” said the multimedia producer on the shoot with me. “The chip is full, we’re gonna take five. Hold the roll for tail sticks.” The words flew over my head as soon as they left his mouth.

“Come again, Chuck?” I inquired.

“The card is full,” he said. “We have to hold the roll for a sec…”

“The roll?” I said with ignorance. “The roll of film...” he replied. “The card is full and we have to put in another.” He seemed dumbstruck that I didn’t know such basic film lingo.

“OK, well what are tail sticks?” I asked. He launched into a five minute explanation. I still don’t know what tail sticks are…

In the case of my HBX film shoot, it can be said that my buddy Chuck was “cursed” by his knowledge of film—he couldn’t help but rely on insider lingo to try to explain to me nuanced concepts (without success I might add).

Now, I must admit that I am completely ignorant about many things (film definitely being one of them). However, I’m guessing that many of you can relate to such an experience, whether in the world of film or in some other realm. If so, you’ve come into close contact with the curse and lived to tell the tale.

But organizations can fall victim too. TCOK is especially common in traditional businesses in which teams are comprised of functional specialists. From product development to marketing, to finance, operations, HR and down the line, specialization often makes communication across functional groups more difficult (especially if unnecessary jargon is involved). For example, how often have you seen engineers and salesmen talking past each other at your company? Or maybe tech and HR butting heads? The result is lost productivity and general frustration.

But hold on, the curse not only exists horizontally across functions, but also vertically across levels. For example, leaders at the top will oftentimes speak rather abstractly about corporate strategy. A CEO may aim to “unlock shareholder value” with some new complicated maneuver or “exploit synergies” through an acquisition. But what exactly does this mean for employees on the front lines? What actions should they take to align with such a strategy? Your guess is as good as mine.

So, how can we combat The Curse of Knowledge to make our companies more productive? In my experience, there are two keys:

1. Find a common language that everyone in your business speaks

To be clear, this is different than “dumbing things down.” It’s more like finding a lowest common denominator that everyone, no matter their role or position, can understand. For example, if a manufacturing business consists of architects, engineers, and floor workers operating machines, the architects and engineers will likely be able to understand the machines they helped build, but the floor workers might not be able to decipher the designs and prototypes of said machines. If a problem with a machine arises, it makes most sense then for all three groups to go down to the floor and speak in the language of the floor workers to resolve the problem. Abstracting to design-speak would be far less effective. This takes practice and empathy but is well worth the effort.

2. Always use concrete language whenever possible

Vague language never helped anyone (except maybe to get out of a lawsuit). For example, if you’re a leader trying to convey a new strategy to your organization, you should favor the specific over the broad. Your mission can be broad, but your strategy should be as specific as possible. Stories and images can work wonders. For example, instead of aiming to “become the leader in customer service” you might tell your employees that you aim to become “the type of company that would order a pizza for your customers to close a sale.” That conveys the extent you’re willing to go to (and the actions the employees might need to take) to execute on the strategy.

Lifting The Curse of Knowledge from your organization won’t be easy. Experts have been around for ages and, like it or not, workers are often still paid for what they know and for what they have done than for how well they can collaborate. However, by using a common language, one that’s concrete and filled with images and stories, you may just break the curse.

Please comment below with your thoughts, and tell me what tail sticks are!

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Interested in learning Financial Accounting, Business Analytics, and Economics for Managers?

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This post is from The Bitter Student, an online multimedia forum started by past HBX CORe participant Sam Campbell. Click here to see the original article.

In early May, I traveled to Boston, MA to attend the HBX ConneXt conference at Harvard Business School. The institution invited students who completed the online educational platform, HBX. I was a participant in HBX CORe and was part of the June 2015 cohort (shout out to my fellow classmates!).

CORe provides the fundamentals -- the ‘core’ concepts -- of business (accounting, analytics, and economics) from leading Harvard Business School faculty, who use the renowned case-study method.

In this post, I hope I can not only discuss my experience and journey with HBX CORe last summer and my trip to HBS, but hopefully, I can also provide some valuable insight and also inspire others to take these or similar courses.

As with any story, there was a beginning. That beginning was in June of 2015. At that time, I thought there would be no end. I could not see the light at the end of the tunnel, as you might say. Note: this is not where my inspiration or jollification starts.

I was still an underclassman in college, and had just concluded my first year. I was completing a full-time internship on top of the twelve hours of course work a week. The courses started right when school ended, and the program spilled over into the start of my sophomore year.

I remember groggily working on these courses after being brain dead from work or while at the beach with friends. The silver lining in all of this though was that I was not alone. There were multiple students who were completing this program during an internship, a 40+ hour work week, or other time-consuming commitments.

A takeaway here is: do not go into these courses thinking you can wing anything, or that the time commitment will be easy to juggle with other responsibilities. It’s possible to pass, but nearly impossible. We learned at the HBXConneXt conference that procrastinators were more likely to fail CORe, while those who focused their efforts more efficiently were more likely to reach high honors. Those who do not put work off and get ahead of their tasks are more likely to be successful in the long run (see chart below).

During the conference in May, there was a session titled: “What’s Next for Online Learning: A Conversation” featuring Anne Dwane (Partner & Co-Founder, GSV Acceleration), Larry Culp (former CEO of Danaher Corp. and senior lecturer at HBS), and Chip Paucek (CEO & Co-Founder at 2U, Inc.). The guest speakers mentioned a couple of thoughts (of which I, of course, took note) about what they think when they see HBX CORe on someone’s resume. I am paraphrasing here; nonetheless, the speakers noted:

1. Desire. Hunger. Self-motivation. Bias to invest in oneself.
2. Lead & win potential.
3. Talent in plain sight.
4. Risk takers because they had confidence in an organization's newly founded program and confidence in themselves to complete the program.
5. Real results. Hard work. Not superficial.
6. Aspiration.

Why persist, you might ask?

I can’t speak on behalf of my cohort, but I persisted for three reasons:

1. I believe knowledge is more than the timeless idiom, “knowledge is power.” Knowledge isn’t just power. Knowledge can be used to empower. It equips us with the tools to help us make a difference in the world.
2. As Michael Priest tells us this in his book 101 Things I Learned in Business School, "Those most likely to be successful in business in the long run have the broadest and most open understanding of it.” 
3. We are at a time in history and live in a world where we need leaders now more than ever.

Community and connection

The platform also requires you to connect and interact with peers. One aspect of the grading is participation. My advice: answer others’ questions as much as possible! Not only are you increasing your grade, but also, as you explain these perplexing concepts to peers – you are learning the material better. Your knee-jerk reaction is to speed through the course, but go ahead and spend the extra hour. This is another great way to make lasting connections because you are investing in others’ education, not just your own.

Once you’re signed up for the program, you have the opportunity to join your classmates in one large Facebook group, as well as cohort-specific Facebook groups. As you start to browse their profile, yep, Facebook stalk, your section mates, you’ll quickly realize how unaccomplished you are. No, really. These accomplished adventurers you will meet are CEO’s of Silicon Valley startups, aids in Washington, DC, and interns at Facebook. They are world changers, to say the least. So, don’t just grow your LinkedIn profile – communicate with these people. Network. Establish relationships.

Putting it all together

The question I have been asked the most, “So what else did you get from this program?” The course taught us the language of business, and it also taught us how to take a case and apply the principles we learned. It challenged us mentally and intellectually, to think critically and analytically. And it taught us how to visualize problems and solutions through a different lens.

After 11 weeks of a rigorous work load – there were three finals to prepare for, that we took at one time at a testing center, that is timed, where there is a whole thirty second break, so you have just enough time to breath (maybe).

Reflecting back to the beginning, I never thought I’d finish. It was a dark tunnel for the longest time, and I still cannot believe I passed. I told myself the entire way, even if I failed the entire thing – I was going to make it to the very end. I could forgive myself if I failed; I could get back up from failure, but I could not forgive myself if I gave up.

These courses were an uphill battle. It was an incredibly difficult journey to get from point A to point B. But does anything actually worth having come easy? Experience CORe, or similar courses – it’s worth the challenge; challenge yourself (in ways you never thought possible) make connections, and use this knowledge to change your world and the world around you.

Thank you, Harvard Business School and Professors Bharat Anand, Jan Hammond, and V.G. Narayanan for this incredible and enlightening journey.

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This post is from The Harbus, the news organization of Harvard Business School. Click here to see the original article and here to learn more about Professor Sharer.

Our HBS General Management class had just completed a series of cases about decision-making processes. In these cases, time and time again the leader or team had made poor decisions with often devastating results. The class had successfully identified several root causes in each case, but a common thread in the cases was that regardless of the process, it had failed to yield a good decision because the collective wisdom of the group had not been effectively revealed and used.

A student approached me after class. “Here’s the problem,” she said. “We may all hope to be General Managers some day, but very soon we will be in less senior roles. We won’t be the leader, deciding on the process or engaging the team through the process. So, how can we speak up effectively and safely, when we have a difficult message that the leaders have not thought about or, worse, do not want to hear?”

This is a common challenge and is not confined to early-career professionals. Mastering the process and art of dissent is a vital skill for anyone working in a group setting. Effectiveness is often determined by when and how you make your views known. Too often individuals blurt out an ill-formed comment that lacks in logic, facts, or clarity and that is powered by an excess of emotion and alarm. The message is lost in the noise.

Admittedly, this is an extreme example, but in the heat of the moment things can go awry. As with most professional challenges, thinking about the problem in a structured way can help.

Let’s break the challenge into its constituent parts. Each element can be considered, understood, and appropriately mastered for the situation at hand. It’s probably not so useful in a do-or-die emergency situation, but hopefully you will not see that circumstance. In those cases, intuition and gut-based judgment will take over. For the more normal, non-emergency circumstance, five elements are in the mix:

1. What is the context and decision process?
2. What is the right time to comment/advocate?
3. Who are likely allies or opponents and what are their views and power base?
4. What phrasing or message will be most impactful, considering both words and emotional content?
5. What follow-up strategy is needed?

Context

Understanding context and the decision process in use should not be too difficult but is often overlooked. In a sense these are the “rules” for how things will go. How close to making the call is the group? What is the history and culture of the process? How important is the outcome and to whom? What is the actual decision process being used and how open is the group to dissent historically? How does the group, and particularly the boss, like to consume information?

Timing

Someone said timing is everything in life and, when trying to change the course of a decision, this is certainly true. There are times when an intervention is too early and times when it is too late. Knowing the context and process helps, but there is also art here. Discussion processes can be organic with discussion ebbing and flowing. There are no hard-and-fast rules. When should you take your shot? Too early, your message evaporates in the noise or, worse, you seem brash. Too late or too cautious, the moment passes with no impact. Listen closely! Your experience, the advice of others, and good instincts will all inform your timing.

Allies

Creating allies ahead of time and knowing who in the room they might be helps. Equally important is understanding who is in opposition, as well as their logic and history. Without a working understanding of the opponent’s view you will likely not be effective in the moment in answering questions and building your case. If you are in a meeting and do not have a clue on this subject, you are lost. Surprising your boss might happen, but is not recommended. Convincing influencers ahead of time and getting advice is never a bad idea. You might find your boss or other more powerful allies can be more effective advocates for the idea than you. You can support his or her position with analysis and important facts.

The Message

How to get the message across is worth real reflection and preparation. What not to do? Use too much emotional heat, be disrespectful or patronizing to others in any way, give a long-winded spiel, or try to talk over others as we see in TV “debates." It is never a good idea and can be fatal to do anything remotely unethical (i.e. pack facts, misstate, exaggerate).

Make your message logical, fact-based, succinct, genuinely respectful of uncertainties and others’ opinions, and be able to answer the obvious questions or objections. Facts and analytics are important if they bear on your logic and are available. State your views with confidence and clarity in an even tone and do not get rattled or flustered. Again, experience will help and observe and learn from others who seem particularly effective.

Follow-Up

Follow-up also counts. At an extreme, if you feel conviction that the group is making a decision that will have truly dire consequences, you may decide that you must share your views outside the work group. In the absolute extreme, you may need to go to the CEO or even the board. This would be a momentous decision that is rare in practice, but know it could be the right decision. Normally, your follow-up is much less dramatic but should be considered. Depending on your conviction, you might want another shot. Again, get your boss’ advice but be prepared to respectfully and thoughtfully appeal. All the elements discussed above are still in play and need to be considered. Persistence can pay off as long as you develop allies, the logic and facts supporting the position are clear and persuasive, your credibility is solid, and you find a time, place, and way for the decision makers to hear. Developing the skill of honest and effective advocacy is a journey but starts with understanding and mastering the basics.

If you haven’t heard of the 2016 Pokémon GO craze, you’ve probably been living under a rock (that was me until this morning, so if you are under the rock, you’re not alone). Yes, I said Pokémon. If you were a child of the '90s like me, you probably remember the game in some capacity.

“Gotta catch ‘em all” was the most used phrase in my second grade class; the video games took over, the cards exploded, and it was a big day when my brother opened a card pack that contained a holographic Charizard in it! But, around 2000 was the last time I heard of them until a new mobile app called Pokémon GO launched this week. The app uses phone cameras and GPS signals to create an augmented reality game where players move around the physical world trying to find and catch Pokémon that appear on screen. If you are as confused about the game as I was, The Guardian has a good primer on it.

What's amazing is how widely the game has been downloaded and played in the first week, including players who've never been into Pokémon or video games in the past. According to an article by Reuters featured on Fortune, in two days Pokémon GO added $7.5 billion to Nintendo’s market value, has surpassed Tinder for total downloads on Android phones, and boasts a daily active user rate that rivals Twitter’s. The average time spent playing the game is 43 minutes a day. That is 43 minutes of quite literally trying to catch ‘em all.

So why the sudden success? Why has Pokémon GO become such a phenomenon and captured the entire world's attention? I have been taking the HBX course Disruptive Strategy with Clayton Christensen, and there is an interesting concept at play here. Is it possible that Nintendo has nailed a difficult “job to be done” perfectly? Possibly.

People often complain about video games, saying: “they keep you inside” or “they are a time suck” or “it keeps me from getting exercise.” A common complaint about exercise is that it's boring or people do not want to pay for (or travel to) a gym.

While the video game industry hasn’t necessarily attempted to address those issues, the exercise community definitely has. There are Zumba classes, cheap gyms, and home workouts. Watches have been made to track steps and alert you when you are sedentary for too long. But, maybe Nintendo has finally found a way to make video games healthier and exercise more fun.

Is it possible that the “job to be done” here was: “help me avoid being unhealthy while playing video games” or “help me enjoy exercising”? If a company could nail these jobs perfectly, the success of whatever that product was would be monumental. Who wouldn’t want to buy/download/use or “hire” a product that makes video games healthy, or makes you actually want to get outside and be active for 45 minutes?

While this could be considered reading into it too much, and maybe I am, it is interesting to look at the success of the game thus far and note how it fills a job that most people would hire if it was nailed perfectly, to use Clayton Christensen’s wording. Well, Nintendo seems to have nailed this job perfectly, and, at least for the moment, is reaping the rewards.

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Want to learn more about "jobs to be done" and other theories from Professor Christensen? Disruptive Strategy will equip you with the tools, frameworks, and intuition to make a difference.

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