"Isn't that the 'stuck up' school?"

That was said to me the other day at Starbucks.  I was there, scoring a great deal on my caramel macchiato, dressed in my Queen's attire, carrying my Queen's blue canvas bag, on my way to meeting my team to do some work towards successfully completing my Queen's MBA.

"Isn't that the 'stuck up' school?"

That's what I thought of Queen's when I was in high school.  I wonder why I thought that.  Why was this core knowledge among my peers?

Now that I am at Queen's, nearly finished actually, I can honestly say that it is one of the friendliest places on Earth.  Except for maybe Disney.  Everyone is nice and accommodating.  Even the scary lady at the DGCC who was on the edge when I arrived, with them having no record of me in the database, turned out to be nice and have a bit of a sense of humour once things were less tense.  (Maybe not the burly guy who gave a couple of my classmates grief for carrying alcohol outside of a licensed area.  He was scary.  Although he was right and the guys were certainly not being subtle about it.)  But that's the staff.  I think the "stuck up" comment related more to students.

From an MBA grad student perspective, everyone I have met is wonderful.  Sure, it seems like a few from the national program have disengaged.  Who hasn't, though, from time to time?  But that doesn't mean that they have snotty, "I am better than you" attitudes.  It doesn't come from there.

I have met a dozen undergrad students, not enough to be a reliable sample mind you (you need 30 for that), and they were all fantastic. Sure, they were selected to be there, but you can hope that they are indicative of the type of people who attend Queen's at an undergrad level.  And here's something interesting:  In chatting with the Fit to Lead crew (I was the Queen of Fit to Lead while in Kingston), the consistent message was that we were all great people and that there had only been two people over the whole summer that were unkind to the students.

Lastly, the knowledge from the crowd (i.e.: Facebook) says that it was only a "privileged few" who tainted Queen's reputation.  Apparently it is an influential "privileged few" who have permeated entire generations with the sense that Queen's is a "stuck up" school.

What a shame.

Nap to Lead

Nap to Lead was a parody presentation that one of the teams made a couple of days ago.  I think we'd all be more productive if we had a little nap time in the afternoon.  Long live Nap to Lead.

Some things I learned today

The two most important questions to ask someone who has an idea:

• Could you tell me how your idea will increase our customers' willingness to pay?
• Will this idea reduce our costs?

You get good innovation by getting rid of the fear of what could happen if one fails.