Yesterday was always going to be a bit of a rush, hence my delay in posting.
I had a really interesting meeting in London late morning, spent the afternoon reading HBR and networking in the Alumni lounge at London Business School and then participated as a Judge (a pseudo potential early-stage investor) in a Trade Show by LBS MBA students in the Discovering Entrepreneurial Opportunities core course.
This is well worth mentioning further.
390 students, working in 65 teams, had identified opportunities which typically focused around resolving a real customer or stakeholder pain. They then distinguished between mere ideas and more valuable opportunities, confirming their hypotheses by observation or primary customer research. Finally they contextualised the opportunities to ensure that they represented distinctive, fresh ways of creating value in the face of incumbents, and thought through the value chain for delivering the solution.
The Trade Show last night was one of the last parts of the course, where they opened up their ideas to peer review and pitched their ideas to a range of Alumni judges including me. I have to say that the standard was extremely high indeed, phenomenal really, especially bearing in mind that this is a core MBA course rather than an elective. It was a real privilege to see their work and full marks should go to the students and the tutors involved!
Of course, in advance of this fascinating day, I had to sneak in a ten mile run, so it was a bit of an early start.
Once again, for time reasons, it was a magic carpet run, but at least that enables me to make a direct comparison with the last two ’10 on the 10th’ runs.
January 10th: 10 miles in 82 minutes, heart rate sub 175, slight post-run staggering, upstairs bathroom in progress.
February 10th: 10 miles in 79.35, heart rate sub 170, scant post-run staggering, bathroom complete.
March 10th: 10 miles in 78.47, heart rate in the low 160’s, no time to stagger afterwards as I had bolt down some breakfast, run through the shower and get to the station!
For more interest (beyond Radio 4) I varied the speed of each quarter mile, warming up at 6 and 6.5mph then cycling thr0ugh 7, 7.5, 8 and 8.5mph until the end.
This certainly made the task more bearable and I definitely feel as if I’m progressing… which is useful bearing in mind that there are only 5 training weekends left before the marathon!