AMP T-5 - so what colour is my luggage?!

They're making me write a blog for the office.  So two birds with one stone, it goes up here too :D

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So people have been asking me if I’m looking forward to the next 7 weeks in Boston.  Here’s the thing.  I'm worried about three main issues (a) hor fun/hae mee/bak kut teh deprivation and MSG withdrawal symptoms; (b) do I even remember how to study?!; (c) how will I function without my wife telling me where I'm supposed to be!
I once went on a business trip to the US.  20+ exhausting hours later, I staggered out of the plane and waited at the luggage carousel, watching blearily as assorted bags and haversacks rumbled past.  2 minutes later, I was on the phone with my wife.

 “Uh… what colour is my luggage dear?”

 True story.

But I digress.  The point of this blog is to talk about the HBS AMP.  Which I haven’t started yet.  But A says, write a blog!  So I guess I’ll have to talk about the pre-course work.  You know, as part of the pre-course preparation, they make you do an accounting e-learning.  The e-learning is really comprehensive – it takes several hours to finish each module, and there are four compulsory modules, and two optional ones.  I personally think the course is very well designed, and the other day when F (from Finance) started to talk about a particular item being “above the line” I was inordinately pleased to realize that I knew what she was talking about :D

 However, the coolest part about the e-learning is not so much the content, but how HBS makes the students take it really seriously (I’m talking to you, yes, you, the one who clicks through every slide of the company e-learning in 5 minutes, in vain hope of rapid absorption by diffusion.  Come on man).  So what they do is this – the quizzes are not multiple-choice.  They’re open ended.  And many of them with a time limit and an ominously decreasing stopwatch on the screen!  Ah, but I hear you ask, how does an e-learning course mark an open-ended question?  Are the HBS professors seriously marking their students’ e-learning responses?

The genius is this – they don’t.  They make the students mark it.  Every answer you put in is visible to every other student.  And yes, you wouldn’t have thought so, but there are students who can really be bothered to read other students’ submissions and mark them.  After a couple of snide comments from your fellow classmates, you really start to put in effort.  You’re even tempted to argue back that their view is wrong and yours is right.  To my amazement, I had become an engaged student without ever having to meet an inspirational professor.

 What possible transformational life lesson can I extract from the genius of HBS e-learning?  The power of peers challenging each other.  If we only take direction from the boss or the professor, then because of the natural verticality of the relationship, we risk only ever knowing “yes” and “no”.  But if we challenge each other as peers, then perhaps we unlock the power of “… but maybe this?”.

 I get the feeling that’s what I’ll be getting into when I start the AMP proper and meet my classmates for real.  But you don’t have to travel 15139.1 km (yes that’s the distance between Boston and Singapore) to start challenging each other to get better.  I once (more than half-seriously) told my team – your KPI is, how many times you stop me from making a mistake.  So challenge yourself today – challenge your teammates, and yes, challenge your boss too!  

 As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.  Proverbs 27:17

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