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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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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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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Out of laundry detergent? Just press an Amazon Dash Button. Out of trash bags? There’s an Amazon Dash Button for that too. What might appear like a seamless way to allow users to order common household products is a new source of data for Amazon to better understand consumer behavior.

How? By using predictive modeling. Predictive modeling is a statistical modeling technique that forecasts an outcome or behavior. This type of modeling often uses historic or current data to predict a future outcome, which can be validated as more data becomes available.

The data collected by the Dash Button is valuable to both Amazon and the manufacturers of products. Dash Buttons give insight into individual patterns of frequency of purchase into a sample of Amazon’s users. Pair this consumption data with Amazon’s rich demographic data, and Dash Buttons are giving new insights to fuel future growth for Amazon.

With this type of data available, perhaps a predictive model could anticipate future consumption and ordering behavior of customers. The future of shopping for household items could mean enrolling and letting predictive modeling take over from there. What if Amazon could accurately predict the amount of laundry detergent and trash bags to ship to you based on your past behavior? This is the future of retail with predictive modeling. 

While the verdict is still unclear if Dash Buttons are a viable, profit-producing technology for Amazon, the data they produce may be more valuable than the products they sell. Every product sold through a Dash Button is a valuable data point that will contribute to Amazon’s next generation of services and products.

To learn more about Amazon’s Dash Button’s data here, check out this article from Fast Company.

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Want to learn more about predictive modeling and other business concepts? HBX CORe will teach you the basics of Business Analytics, Economics, and Financial Accounting using Harvard Business School's renowned case-based methodology!

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In part 1 of this post, HBX Excutive Director Patrick Mullane spoke about his transition from military to civilian life. In part 2, he offers additional tips on how to make a successful career transition.

Tip 3: Network, network, network

Technology not only helps educate you but it can help you to connect with others. HBX has built peer help features into its platform and uses closed Facebook pages to foster cooperation, communication, and networking, so connecting to others happens while you are learning. LinkedIn is another critical tool. Next to the magnifying glass icon at the top of the LinkedIn home page is the word “advanced.” Click on this and you are given power to search the larger network with precision. Use the search area on the left side of the screen to find people who share common experiences with you. Typing my alma mater’s name into the “school” field and the abbreviation “Lt.” in the “title” block yields 80 graduates of Notre Dame that were some sort of Lieutenant during their career. You can do the same for job titles, locations, and the like. If you are transitioning out of the military, sending a note to fellow alums through the LinkedIn system explaining that you are a veteran leaving the service and are looking for introductions into a certain industry or region can be very, very effective. You may have to pay a monthly subscription to get some of the messaging features on LinkedIn, but they are well worth it to expand your network and gain the help and trust of others.

Tip 4: Don’t forget about your alma mater

Most colleges and universities maintain a webpage where recruiters can post jobs, and Alumni usually have access to these postings. Don’t be shy about calling the career development office of your undergraduate institution to see what sort of services they offer. If there is a strong alumni club in the area where you live or will be moving to, think about joining that as well. When finishing a meeting with alumni, ask them, “Who else would you suggest I speak with to learn more about [fill in your industry or career interest].” Phrasing the request this way has a way of keeping the conversation moving forward and increases the likelihood that you will leverage one meeting into others. And always follow up with a thank you note. While hand-written is always a nice touch, email works as well. But just be sure you do it!

Final thoughts

There will always be trepidation when making a change. And moving from the military to private sector, can, at first glance, look daunting. But rest assured that almost all of your military skills will translate nicely into the private sector. Brushing up on business fundamentals, resume prep, networking, and using your alma mater are not exhaustive steps to take in an effort to land on your feet in the civilian world, but they are foundational in many respects. Working on them while seeking the diverse opinions of others who have gone before you will increase the chances that things go smoothly.

It’s been 20 years since I left the Air Force and during that time I have called on my experiences as a JMO in jobs that were in sectors about as diverse as you can fathom: distribution, manufacturing, software, Internet, for-profit education, non-profit education, and telecom. In all cases, the foundation the military gave me was instrumental in making the right decision. Rest assured, the same will be true for you.

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Back in the waning days of the Cold War, I entered the US Air Force as a newly-minted second lieutenant out of the University of Notre Dame’s ROTC program with a degree in mathematics. I was assigned to an intelligence-related unit in California and served for a little over four years, loving every minute of my time. When the time came to explore the world beyond the military, I found myself well-prepared in some ways, but under-prepared in other ways. Read on for tips on how to prepare for your own career transitions, be it from military to civilian life, or from school to the "real world."

During my time in the US Air Force, I managed a team of around 20 contractors and military personnel operating satellite systems, getting fantastic leadership experience while being entrusted with more than a billion dollars of hardware that informed senior decision makers in Washington on a daily basis. With 25 years of general management experience behind me, I've often said that I had more responsibility during those four years than I’ve had since. The US military’s trust in young men and women is unsurpassed and, in virtually all cases, that trust is well placed. Officers and troops often succeed in ways that belie their experience.

My search for a soft landing

As a junior military officer (JMO) exiting the service at 27 years old, I was terrified of how my military skills would (or, more fearfully, would not) translate to the private sector. But like all of those separating from the service, the time came to make the leap and I took a job at an auto parts manufacturing and distribution company, managing a location in Omaha, Nebraska where I quickly realized that in so many ways, I was much better prepared than I thought.

Leadership aspects of the job came naturally to me as did decision-making. But I couldn’t shake this nagging feeling that I was missing some key skills and so began considering returning to school. I researched what an MBA was and ultimately decided that business school was likely the best path for me.

So apply I did, to several MBA programs. To my suprise, I was accepted at the Harvard Business School (HBS) and spent two years there from 1997 to 1999 getting my MBA. It was one of the most amazing experiences of my life, truly transformative.

If I was afraid of how competitive I’d be in the private sector coming out of the military, I was even more afraid of the rigors of an MBA program. I prepared as best I could, taking an accounting course at the University of Nebraska in the months leading up to my matriculation at Harvard. I was also required by HBS (as were many others from non-business backgrounds) to complete some work before beginning the program that ostensibly got me to a level of expertise that would put me, if not on par, close to on par with my classmates who would be coming out of banking and consulting. The extra preparation helped and, two years later, I had my MBA and was ready to dive back into the private sector pool.

After stints in a startup and as the CEO of a manufacturing company (among other things), I am now the Executive Director of HBX, the Harvard Business School’s digital education initiative. I often think back on my days as a JMO worrying about how to best have a “soft landing” in the private sector. Specifically, I think of how much easier it is today to prepare for that landing in an age of online offerings that aim to educate people from all walks of life.

Tip 1: Brush up on business fundamentals

MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) such as EdEx and Coursera offer courses that teach an array of business disciplines and they can be a good option for getting some fundamentals down and showing potential employers your seriousness and intellectual curiosity. Some of these courses are offered at no charge but provide for the option to receive a “verified certificate” upon completion of the class for a nominal fee. Others charge when you register. The quality and depth of courses can vary substantially so it’s worth studying the syllabus and, to the extent possible, sampling the course to be sure it will meet your needs.

At HBX, our Credential of Readiness (CORe) program is another fantastic option to learn the language of business in one, integrated program. The course covers three fundamental disciplines: Economics for Managers, Business Analytics, and Financial Accounting. While the practices learned are important, perhaps more impactful is how students say that the course gave them a confidence and a language they never had before. 

As HBS has done for more than a century, instruction in CORe is accomplished through the case method of study. This pedagogy relies on real-world issues addressed by real-world managers (we call them protagonists since they are central figures in a story) that require the student to learn by discovery in concert with his or her peers. Just as in the HBS classroom, students learn from others who have different experiences and expertise through an online peer help function. Unlike MOOCs, which are generally a standard platform that content “slots” into, HBX is a platform custom-built to facilitate the case method and the student community necessary to make such a method of teaching effective.

Tip 2: Get your resume ready for prime time 

If you are just getting out of the military, it’s likely been a while since you created a resume. Take the time to do it well. Besides the usual advice to ensure you have correct grammar and spelling, there are several other things that JMOs (and anybody else for that matter) should keep in mind given the mistakes I’ve seen people make when I was the hiring manager. 

First, if you use a personal statement or “objective” statement of some kind at the top of your resume, ensure that it’s about the employer and not about you. Having an objective statement that says: “To find a job that allows me to further develop my leadership skills and one day become a senior manager in a manufacturing firm” is much less appealing to an employer than: “To use my leadership skills to build, train and drive a high performance manufacturing team that delivers on time and on budget.” The first statement is about what you want. The second is about what you can do to help your future employer.

Second, keep it short. In general, no matter how many great things you have to say about yourself, if it takes too much room to say them, people will lose interest. For most JMO’s I’d argue that your resume shouldn’t be more than one page if you’re exiting the service as a 26-year-old O3. Of course, if you have more experience, dipping into two pages is fine but beyond that I think little is gained and you risk turning off the reader.

Third, spend time taking the jargon out of your resume. This also applies to people changing industries. Thinking back to my military experience, a government description of my duty would have been something like “Managed a team operating national security assets providing 24/7 intelligence coverage used to inform the national command authority.” While accurate, much will be lost on somebody who has not served. Saying that I “operated satellites that gathered intelligence used to inform the President daily” was much shorter, simpler, and impactful. 

Click here to see part 2 of Patrick's post!

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This post was originally published on Linkedin Pulse. 

The last couple of months I’ve interviewed a dozen expert negotiators who’ll appear in an online negotiation course I’m helping develop at HBS. Among them are a dealmaker at Microsoft, a couple of entrepreneurs, the head of a real estate investment fund, and the mayor of a mid-sized city.

And then there’s Chris Voss, a former FBI hostage negotiator. What, you might ask, can a hostage negotiator like him teach the rest of us about making business deals or negotiating in our daily lives? Plenty, it turns out.

Chris is skeptical about a lot of conventional wisdom about negotiation. And on some important points, I’m convinced he’s right.

Specifically, he thinks the focus on win-win outcomes and expanding the pie has things backwards. To him, the process—not the result—is the heart of negotiation. In order to get something done, you have to connect with whoever it is that you’re dealing with. And if you can do that in a life-and-death situation, as he has done, then you can connect with anyone.

I found three of Chris's negotiation strategies particularly striking:

1. Employ Tactical Empathy

Chris says it’s not what you do or even say that drives success. Rather, it’s how you behave, your general demeanor, and your delivery that really matter.

Chris has perfected what he calls his “late night FM voice.” I heard it during our interview. He slows his pace and brings the pitch down.

There’s nothing threatening in his tone. He’s comfortable with silence. The idea is to get the other person to relax his defenses. It’s almost hypnotic.

Chris draws people out by asking how they are feeling, though he is ultra-careful in his phrasing. He wants to take any hint of aggression out of the conversation. In his experience, the singular pronoun ‘I’ gets people’s guard up. So Chris would never say, “I’m hearing that you think . . .” Instead he’d observe, “It sounds like . . ..”

2. Embrace a Negative Response

Rather than striving to get to yes, Chris loves it when the other person says “No.” It gives that person an active role in the conversation. They can feel a degree of control and security. And for Chris, who is listening, it opens up an opportunity for him to probe—delicately—for what it is they really want. According to Chris, “Great negotiators often seek ‘No’ because they know that’s where the real negotiation begins.”

Chris treads lightly when probing the other person’s mindset. He avoids asking any questions that might sound like cross-examination. For instance, he would never ask, “Why did you do it?” Instead, he’d say, “What caused you to do it?” In his view, the former phrasing invites defensiveness and self-justification. Instead, he prefers questions that begin with “what” and “how” because they are more open-ended.

3. Lead With Potential Objections

Chris believes the reasons why a counterpart won’t make an agreement with you are often more powerful than why they might. So, deal with objections first.

That’s akin to my post last year “To get a YES, expect a NO.” But in our interview, he took the idea further by describing the importance of doing an accusation audit in preparing for negotiation. I’d never heard that phrase, but his explanation seemed right to me.

“List the worst things that the other party could say about you,” he said, “and say them before the other person can.”  Starting out a negotiation by acknowledging the other person’s objections and resentments, takes them off the table. And it’s also disarming.

Chris gives an example in his recent book, Never Split the Difference. Since retiring from the FBI, Chris has been doing consulting and training. For one particular job, he had teamed up with some other people. But before the deal was struck, the client cut the budget significantly. That meant that the fees would be less than Chris originally offered his partners.

When he called them to break the bad news, the first words out of his mouth were, “I have a lousy proposition for you...” Chris went on to say that he knew that they would think he was a “big talker” and that he had “screwed up completely.”

Essentially, he was anticipating their negative reaction and if anything, exaggerating it, in order to clear the air. But then Chris added, “Still, I wanted to bring this opportunity to you before I took it to someone else.”

And as you might expect, after a little grumbling, his partners agreed to cut their rates.

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During Thursday’s Brexit vote, the value of the British pound fluctuated wildly – starting at $1.47/￡, it climbed as high as $1.50/￡ before dropping to $1.35/￡. What causes these currency fluctuations? 

While the easy answer is “uncertainty” – and there is certainly a lot of uncertainty in Britain right now – the harder question might be “if I were running a business and needed to know what the value of the pound should be, what should I do?” Financial investors do this every day, and thousands were doing so Thursday night – and their actions caused the shifts in value.

The stunning collapse of the British pound, in one chart https://t.co/XaGPqevTMp

— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) June 24, 2016

Before the vote, it was speculated that the appropriate value of the pound if the "Remain" campaign were to win would be $1.55/￡, and the appropriate value of the pound if the "Leave" campaign were to win would be $1.30/￡. By the end of the vote – one of these would be true, but until then, how should they value the pound?

The best way to do this is to consider each scenario in a weighted average of their probabilities. This will yield what in finance is known as an “expected value.” In this case, if we believe the probability of "Leave" to be p%, then the expected value of the pound will be $1.30 * p% + $1.55 * (1-p%). 

Across the world Thursday night, analysts who wanted to know the value of the pound furiously tried to determine what p% would be, and from that, determine what they should do. Let’s say you were such an analyst, and you believed the possibility of a "Leave" victory was 25%. What should you do? 

Well, first, you would figure out what you believed the value of the pound should be, so: $1.30(.25) + $1.55(1-.25) = $1.48.

If the current value of the pound is $1.47/￡, then you believe that it is undervalued. You should buy pounds, because they are currently cheap. If everyone believes that the probability of a "Leave" victory were 25%, then everyone will do the same, and eventually, the increased demand for the pound will increase the price – to exactly $1.48/￡.

You can also take the current price and back out the assumed probability. As the exit polls came out, and a "Remain" victory looked likely, the value of the pound spiked to $1.50/￡. What did that mean about p%?

Consider: $1.30(p%) + $1.55(1-p%) = $1.50. The value of p% is 20%. That means, at that point, investors believed there was a 20% chance of a Leave victory (meaning an 80% chance of a "Remain" victory). Overnight, as voting was counted, the value of the pound dropped to $1.35. $1.30(p%) + $1.55(1-p%) = $1.35. That means p% is 80%. The expected probability had flipped, with "Leave" now having an 80% chance of victory.

Thursday night, financial analysts were constantly revising their figures in an attempt to get ahead of their peers. The questions they were asking – what is the value of the pound if "Leave" wins? What is the value of the pound if "Remain" wins? And what is the probability of a "Leave" victory? – were translated into decisions to buy or sell the pound, which corresponded immediately into changes in its value.

These simple equations, along with your own intuition, can be the edge in preparing for uncertainty and knowing the expected future.

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