As a member of Project Pyramid's Leadership Team, I am building an Advisory Board for the organization comprised of C-Level officers and Foundations from around the world. This is an exciting process as I get to design and build the board from the ground up. This way, if it does not work, I can be assured that it was all my fault. I am working with Professor Bart Victor and Dean Jim Bradford on this process. I recently had a meeting with Dean Bradford to talk about the vision for Project Pyramid and to get his advice on how I should go about building the board.
First, it is important to understand that not many people get to even build a board in their professional careers and for that I consider myself very fortunate. Second, it is amazing to have a mentor like Jim, especially since he has built multiple advisory board's during his tenure as Dean. Jim started talking and I listened, taking notes... then he started getting excited about the possibilities and we started connecting a lot of dots. The conversation lasted about 15 minutes but at the end my hand was cramping and I had three pages of notes from our discussion. Jim walked to his shelf and pulled out a 3 inch binder, handed it to me and said, "Read this, and we'll talk again soon." The binder contained Jim's strategy and notes that guided him through building Owen's Board of Visitors.
While this module of classes makes me wonder if I will ever forget the intermittent torture that I am putting myself through in the classroom, I will always remember the opportunities for learning and development that I have been given outside the classroom here at Owen. While I am learning how to compute Section 1231 gains in the classroom, I get to learn how to build a Board of Directors outside the classroom.
But I sometimes wonder about the rhythm of the samba...









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