My lunch appointment with a classmate got pushed back a little, so I’ve actually got some free time during the day to throw in a quick entry. I’m only halfway through my day of classes and I’m already set to go home and take a nap. Fridays are always tough with classes from 8am to 5pm, but I guess it’s my fault for signing up for this kind of schedule. It’s all good though because I’ve basically got a 5 day weekend coming up. Thank goodness for the President’s Day holiday on Monday. Because of the holiday, there are no classes at Stanford on monday and all of our monday classes at the GSB have been moved to Tuesday (with the tuesday classes cancelled). So, since my only class on Mondays is an Education School class that isn’t getting moved to Tuesday, I won’t have class on Monday or Tuesday. And, as some of you know, Wednesday is our weekly day-off, so I’m golden. I’m seriously hopiong to get ahead on my work over the next 5 days. I’m even thinking about knocking out some of my projects and papers that aren’t due for another 2-3 weeks just to get them out of the way. It is SO nice to have time to sit back and kick it for a few days.
This week was a pretty active one at the GSB with three session of our View From the Top series in the past 4 days. This series is one where we have distinguished business or government leaders make an hour-long presentation about any topic that they want to cover. I’ve written about a couple of them (Steve Ballmer and Jack Welch) before and they’re always a treat. Unfortuantely, they were all oversubscribed and we had to have tickets to get into them, so it was pretty hard to get all three of them. I was fortunate enough to get a ticket to the presentation by Sheila Johnson, co-founder of BET and founder of Salamander Hospitality, yesterday. She’s a Black woman who, along with her ex-husband, created the first TV network focused on the Black market and instantly became a billionaire when they sold it to Viacom for $3 Billion a few years ago. I found her speech to be inspiring, especially considering all of the struggles that she’s had to deal with during her career having two “strikes” against her…being a woman and being African-American. I was especially interested in a development project that she’s got going on in Middleburg, VA to build a destination spa and resort. As y’all know, I love my home state and I’m always happy to see people investing in it. Ms. Johnson’s presentation was co-sponsored by the Black Business Student Association and, through that co-sponsorship, some of our members (including me) got to have lunch with her. She is definitely a business leader who “keeps it real”…I wish she would have had more time to spend with us, but she had to rush out to catch a flight after an hour. I am hoping to get in contact with her soon so I can take her out to lunch next time I go to VA to visit my family. I’d love to pick her brain about some of her philanthropic activities because I’m all about helping the kids and that’s one of her passions too.
One more thing before I go…as some of you know, I’ve been maintaining two versions of this blog for a little over a year now because I was worried that the original version would get taken down. Well, I was told recently that the other version was about to be shelved as a part of the “restructuring” of that other site. Now, this Blogspot version will be the only one that I will keep updated and, in fact, I can’t even access the interface to add to the other version. If you know anyone who is following this blog on that other site, could you pass the link to this version to them. Judging from some of the emails and comments I’ve gotten, there are some folks who’ve been following this joint for a while, so I don’t want those folks to think that this thing is dead. Thanks in advance.
This week was a pretty active one at the GSB with three session of our View From the Top series in the past 4 days. This series is one where we have distinguished business or government leaders make an hour-long presentation about any topic that they want to cover. I’ve written about a couple of them (Steve Ballmer and Jack Welch) before and they’re always a treat. Unfortuantely, they were all oversubscribed and we had to have tickets to get into them, so it was pretty hard to get all three of them. I was fortunate enough to get a ticket to the presentation by Sheila Johnson, co-founder of BET and founder of Salamander Hospitality, yesterday. She’s a Black woman who, along with her ex-husband, created the first TV network focused on the Black market and instantly became a billionaire when they sold it to Viacom for $3 Billion a few years ago. I found her speech to be inspiring, especially considering all of the struggles that she’s had to deal with during her career having two “strikes” against her…being a woman and being African-American. I was especially interested in a development project that she’s got going on in Middleburg, VA to build a destination spa and resort. As y’all know, I love my home state and I’m always happy to see people investing in it. Ms. Johnson’s presentation was co-sponsored by the Black Business Student Association and, through that co-sponsorship, some of our members (including me) got to have lunch with her. She is definitely a business leader who “keeps it real”…I wish she would have had more time to spend with us, but she had to rush out to catch a flight after an hour. I am hoping to get in contact with her soon so I can take her out to lunch next time I go to VA to visit my family. I’d love to pick her brain about some of her philanthropic activities because I’m all about helping the kids and that’s one of her passions too.
One more thing before I go…as some of you know, I’ve been maintaining two versions of this blog for a little over a year now because I was worried that the original version would get taken down. Well, I was told recently that the other version was about to be shelved as a part of the “restructuring” of that other site. Now, this Blogspot version will be the only one that I will keep updated and, in fact, I can’t even access the interface to add to the other version. If you know anyone who is following this blog on that other site, could you pass the link to this version to them. Judging from some of the emails and comments I’ve gotten, there are some folks who’ve been following this joint for a while, so I don’t want those folks to think that this thing is dead. Thanks in advance.
