This past week, I had the absolute pleasure of attending the AIGA/Yale Business Perspectives for Creative Leaders at the Yale School of Management.
In future posts, I hope to share some of the more relevant topics we discussed as it pertains to marketers. However, this course was designed and created specifically for creative business leaders, and I really was amongst my peers in this program and that helped elevate and deepen our learning, investigations and discussions.
The professors were each amazing, one right after the next. All of them are at the top in their fields of expertise with real world experience and each bio blew me away with their list of accomplishments.
You would think this would make them unapproachable when the exact opposite actually true. They were patient, humorous, surprising, passionate and each one was sincere when they announced that teaching this course – to a group of creative leaders – was their favorite because they were met with equal passion for the material and a completely different point-of-view than that of their own, of their peers or of their business students. They wanted to learn as much from us as we were hungry to learn from them.
It made for an amazing, electrified exchange of ideas and knowledge, as you can imagine. Sometimes we were all so engaged in our discussions that we would keep the conversation going well past our break or lunch. We just didn’t want the discussion and learning to end. I still wish it was going ….
The topics we covered were law, negotiations, innovation, business organization, accounting and finance, value propositions, how to talk to the C-Suite (which was similar to a foreign language 101 class!), managing stress, leadership skills, the future role of the designer in business and so much more.
Before the course began, as my staff will verify, there was a ton of pre-work before our immersion class began and everyone was so well prepared that we were able to cover a lot of ground quickly and deeply in our time on campus. That said, I am still eager to assist the program director to get a Part Two of the certificate program in the works as soon as possible.
We were treated as special guests by Yale University all week. We had cocktail receptions at the Beinecke Library, walking tours of the campus, gourmet meals every afternoon and night prepared by a fabulous chef, showered with special Yale SOM gifts, luxury accommodations and a well-run program from the start to our “graduation” in Branford college complete with a champagne toast, string musicians, dinner and presented with lovely certificates.
One of my classmates, George Argyros, Partner and VP of Soulsight, said about the program, “You have all been key to a fantastically inspiring moment in my life. I am thrilled to have this feeling of renewed energy. I am charged up to not only do bigger and better, but to do them smarter and more thoughtfully.”
And another classmate of mine, Shawn Broderick of Akamai, said, “The entire process was very eye opening to not only the influences of the design world but as to how design can be a major influence to the business world.”
The knowledge I gained has just begun. The real work is still ahead. As I remarked to one of my classmates – it is as though I’ve been in a room and thought I had opened all the windows and doors but this course just showed me that there is another door, leading down another hallway, that I didn’t even know existed. It is my responsibility now continue this path of knowledge wherever it leads. I’m looking forward to continuing my new found education in these areas on my own because for me, the learning never ends. And I hope it doesn’t for you, either.
~Amy
