Richmond cronies

Brief by-word before I get started. No, I have not heard a squeak from the WSG (A Good Thing). Yes, I did meet up with the EnglishGuy this evening. Yes, he was very charming, and no, he did not pounce on me. Way too gentlemanly. (None of this "friendly" Philadelphian business.)

Btw, EnglishGuy, if you are reading this - and thanks to ScaryCzechLady's big mouth I have to accept there is a good probability that you are - hello.

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So today saw the First Ever Teaching of my Euronext case. I was pretty nervous. You have to be nervous about any First Year MC (management communications) class in the fourth quarter. There was a good chance that absolutely noone in the class would have their eyes open, let alone having bothered even reading the case.

In the end, it was OK, I think. The first class went well. Marc Modica is obssessed with negotiation frameworks, and I think that approach actually does work quite well with my case. But at least half the class seemed to be paying attention of some sort (having at least one eye open, for example).

In the second run, with a different group of students, it was a disaster. I was cringing madly. Those who were awake sat there playing solitaire on their laptops. Then when forced to speak, rather than discuss the issues, the students started debating whether it was OK to use bullet points in a memo or not. Such tangent chasing is a classic diversionary tactic employed by those who have not read the case, and have no intention of even trying surreptitiously to do so while the class is in progress. How do I know this? Because I am poacher turned gamekeeper.


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Last year, as publisher of the Darden school newspaper, I decided that rather than applying myself to the job hunting and whatever academic delights were served up by the second semester, it would be a good idea to publish a Zagat-esque independent guide (as in, not written or censored by school administrators and faculty) to second year elective classes. I am a great believer in free markets, but free markets only function if the participants have adequate information.

But when I mooted the idea last year, the school administrators, predictably, were less than enthusiastic. They had visions of furious faculty picketing their offices following negative reviews of their classes. The beauty of the US, however, is that one just has to mention the words "First Amendment" and even paranoid ultra-cautious school administrators tend to get right back into their boxes.

So we went ahead, my fellow classmates submitted their reviews, and while on grounds of taste I chose to edit out the very most gratuitously personally insulting bits of the reviews, 99.5% of what was said ran. And despite all the administration's direst forecasts of doom and disaster, no ceilings collapsed, no picket lines formed, and everyone generally agreed it had been a fairly useful venture.

This year, a new dude was in charge of the Elective Guide. It came out today, and I couldn't resist flicking through it. On the whole, I thought there was just the right amount of criticism and adulation. However, one comment did stand out. The teachers of the Corporate Governance elective were described as "three old has-been Richmond cronies stuck in the 1800s". Seeing as all three of these guys are extremely successful businessmen, authors of one of the most recently published textbooks on subject, and one of them has just been to Geneva at the invitation of the UN to advise on corporate governance issues, I felt that was a little bit harsh. But maybe I am biased because they always wrote nice things on MY weekly book reports...