15. Synthesis of the Course

I feel so lucky to have taken this course because it was purely by chance that I chose to join BSE. It completely changed my internal thought from here on out. After all the extensive class readings, assignments, and this very lengthy PCR, I had begun to think in a business mindset 24/7, whether I wanted to or not. The idea of innovation became an obsession.

Here is a story of my fascination with BMGT lessons. After reading and discussing The Necessity of Strangers with my class, I became so obsessed with the ideas that I called my friend and told her to join me in following Gregerman’s model for ourselves. We took the Metro into D.C. and decided we wanted to go on an adventure. We didn’t know where we were going, but we asked a stranger where a good place to go eat would be. He suggested that we check out Adams Morgan, a trendy neighborhood in D.C. so that is what we did. We looked at all the restaurants and figured: we could either do this the easy way or the hard way. The hard way was actually the most fun. We walked into a traditional Ethiopian restaurant where we looked completely out of place. In addition, I couldn’t read a single word on the menu because it wasn’t in English. I ended up asking the waitress to just bring us their most popular dish. When it arrived it looked like an assortment of vomit on a large flat sponge, but it tasted so good. It felt awesome to get out of my comfort zone like that and end up at a totally bizarre area of town thanks to the suggestion of another Metro passenger. I think the fact that I find such joy in trying new things means that my innovative potential is steadily increasing.

If you looked on my desk you would see an abundance of sticky notes posted all over it as a way of employing IDEO’s design thinking theory. My friends started to notice I wouldn’t sit next to them in class anymore. This was because I was trying to follow Reid Hoffman’s advice of building an extensive network and making connections.

All of this may sound strange, but this is the first time I have ever enjoyed a class so much that the teachings overflowed into my everyday life. Therefore, this was the first time that I actually saw a class as being useful in every way for my future.

Paying attention to all of my bad qualities isn’t easy, but it is in fact necessary if I want to improve as a creative thinker. My aim is to model my self-improvement after the idea of a “permanent Beta”. Google felt that once they considered their product to be finished, that’s when competitors would come and try to take over. Jeff Bezos signs all of his letters at the bottom with, “at Amazon it’s always day one. “ If we think a product is finished, it will soon be antiquated. I need to be my own product in permanent Beta. There are still so many issues and bugs that need to be worked out, but I believe that I’m still a promising product that just needs some faith and planning to become amazing.