Part eight: At 2.30am I wake, killing my alarm’s buzzer before it could finish the first beep. There is a full moon above our farm and next to me I see my friends are still asleep under the open sky.
Quietly I wake up the one nearest and we wake up the whole group. With hardly a word and with no torches, we get ready. The night before we had laid out our camouflaged clothing, water bottles and everything needed for the upcoming “mission”. Before long everyone is ready and as quietly as we got up, we start marching into the night.
Our farm lies on the international border between South Africa and Lesotho. With no farmhouse or permanent presence, events can become a little unruly there at times. One of the biggest headaches is the theft of grazing. Under the cover of darkness, herders sometimes bring scores of cattle from Lesotho across the Caledon River (which is the border) and by morning a whole lucern crop might be gone.
Although detrimental to my late father’s cashflows, this did provide my brothers and me with a source of great adventure as we grew up. Any cow caught could by law be resold to its owner at at nominal price, and we would often bring friends home from boarding school to help make a little “pocket money”.
Marching into the night, the surroundings and sounds are thus familiar to me. Yet something is different. Walking with me is not the usual crew of childhood friends, but jetsetting Stanford MBA students. And while they focus on where the cattle could appear, I try to mentally reconcile the huge difference between two of my worlds that have finally met.
The academic experience at Stanford has been an enormously rewarding one. And while technical concepts and new ideas have been the outline of this experience, the true colour was added by the selfless sharing of those that have done it all before.
During my first year I had a glimpse of this through addresses in the View from the Top speaker series and in conferences on anything from entrepreneurship to investing. Yet in the second year the amount and level of first-hand sharing increased significantly. During the autumn term, most of my courses had the case protagonist present, debriefing us on the outcome and answering questions from students.
These class visitors spanned an array of personalities and backgrounds. One of the most memorable of these was in my Formation of New Ventures class. Our visitor for the day was Sheldon Adelson, the third richest individual in the US, with a personal net worth of more than $20bn. Listening to his pearls of wisdom, I could not help but reflect on how privileged we were. This was no special speaker series nor an entrepreneurship conference, but simply a small, normal, 8am class!
And as generous as it was of Mr Adelson to share his time, just as brave had been the failed entrepreneur to stand in front of us and tell us where he went wrong. Looking forward to my elective courses in the winter quarter, I hope this pattern will repeat itself. With titles such as paths to power; building and managing professional sales organisations; and interpersonal dynamics, these courses will continue to explore topics very different from – and much more subtle than – the first year core.
Unlike most second-year courses, interpersonal dynamics will not have external visitors. Better known as “touchy feely”, this course has been taught at Stanford for more than 50 years and is about learning how to learn from others. Organised into groups of 12 students and a facilitator, participants explore ways of expressing more of themselves, on giving and receiving feedback in a constructive way and on building the appropriate interpersonal and group climate. And if feedback from alumni is anything to go by, this will be one of the most useful and memorable courses and will take classroom sharing a few notches higher.
Yet sharing has by no means been limited to the classroom and academic settings. Reading over my past entries, I find daily student interactions permeated by this same underlying spirit. The sharing of: past experiences through the talk ’07 series; homes and cultures through small group dinners, food festivals, Americans having foreigners over for Thanksgiving, and foreigners taking Americans on study trips to their home countries; talents through the arts day and the annual show; emotion through visiting a classmate in hospital; time and ability through community projects and taking leadership roles in non-profit organisations; possessions ranging from cars to candy…the list goes on.
Of course this came full circle for me when 20 classmates arrived in South Africa over the Christmas break for a four-week trip. From rowing precariously close to hippos in the Okavango Delta; watching lions laze in the morning sun; whitewater rafting down the “mighty” Zambezi; ordering lunch from menus without prices (because of the rapid inflation in Zimbabwe); and wining and dining in Cape Town – this was an incredible experience for the group, most of whom had never been to Africa.
And while I was probably the only one not to take 30 pictures of the elephants playing in Chobe River, seeing how my classmates reacted to everything was just as entertaining.
Yet for me the highlight of the trip has been this latest adventure, when I brought a subset of the group to our farm to “rough it” one last time before we have to head back to the other side of the world. Seeing how quickly two of my classmates got back into the saddle after spectacular, simultaneous falls from horseback (only to fall again and get back into the saddle again) showed business school tenacity was not limited to the boardroom. In addition we drove up mountains and down valleys in 4x4s, drank whisky next to the campfire and floated down the river on top of tractor tubes. And, of course, there was the night march…
Looking at some of my classmates on the farm, I see the great athlete who had taught me the rules of American football and whose parents so generously hosted me as a guest during the summer.
I see the Las Vegas summer intern who had organised a weekend of entertainment on the “strip” for a group of us. I see the volunteer firefighter who took me along on dispatches from his station. And I see the friendly Chilean who will lead me on a hike in Patagonia during the spring. With so much sharing, no two worlds are really that irreconcilable.
In fact, the only thing that separates talking to a billionaire during an 8am class and catching cows on the Lesotho border is a bumpy flight across the Atlantic.
Part 7: Exotic sports, friendship and exploration
Part 6: Work and play sees the summer away
Part 5: Doing, not just saying
Part 4: Scramble begins for summer internships
Part 3: Heaps of work and some play too, as the pace quickens
