The Turing Test: #PepperatIE
I first met IE Business School Big Data & Analytics lecturer Ms. Christina Stathopoulos in June last year at an IE faculty reunion, during which I told her about some of my communications initiatives, such as IE Humanities in @ minute, The other side of IE alumni, The other side of IE professors, and so forth. A few days later, Ms. Stathopoulos contacted me via Linkedin to explore the possibility of shooting a video. We then initiated a long-distance conversation that led to any number of postponed meetings due to Ms. Stathopoulos’s extremely busy agenda: apart from her IE duties, she has a demanding job at Google and keeps busy with myriad other projects. Eventually we were able to meet again a few months later: on October 29th to be precise.
When we finally sat down to discuss her video, I discovered that Ms. Stathopoulos is among many things, a bookworm, so we automatically connected and had soon agreed on doing something about the thorny issue of the dialogue between the worlds of technology and the humanities, or as Scott Hartley describes it, between the fuzzies and the techies.
That was the easy part, but from that initial agreement to getting round to filming took a while longer, but we persevered and managed to shoot the video on March 15. I hope you enjoy it. I think the wait was more than worth it.
Please let us know which of the three poems #PepperatIE is reading in this video you think were written by the robot. And if you want to see part of what keeps Ms. Stathopoulos busy, check out her #bookaweekchallenge
P.S: this video wouldn’t have been possible without the invaluable help of Carlos Ernesto Muñoz Sanz, a data specialist at IE, and who programmed #PepperatIE to read the poems and move around…
Copa Courier
Peruvian-Born IE Business School alum Ralph Michaud is now Logistics and Special Projects Senior Manager at Copa Airlines. Here he talks about his experience at IE and what he cares about professionally, while walking around the headquarters of one of the most successful companies in Latin America, Copa Airlines. Ralph is articulate, very passionate, focused, and, most importantly of all, one of those rare people who likes to walk the talk.
P.S. Ralph Michaud has a degree in computer science and systems engineering (Universidad de San Martín de Porres, Perou). In addition to being an IE Business School MBA graduate 2007, he is IE Alumni Panama Club President
Giving back
Sabiene Heindl, apart from being an alum who graduated from the IE Brown Executive MBA program in 2014, is a corporate lawyer and businessperson by training and instinct. “I empower innovative organizations to prosper in an increasingly competitive, technological, fast-paced disrupted environment through sophisticated strategies aligned with commercial objectives”, she says about herself.
In this video she takes us on a tour of Sydney telling us why it’s important to give back to society and why a lawyer should do an MBA. Don’t miss what she has to say about the Sydney Opera House!!!
Beyond Kumbaya
Coach & Leadership Professor Michael Chang Wenderoth asks himself a question you might well ask yourself every day. What really got them there? What is it that propels people to the top? He says that the usual answer people give you to this question is that you have to be hard-working, positive, willing,… In short he calls this approach the “Kumbaya school of leadership” or the political puppy approach.
In contrast –he says- what we see around us is that people who self-promote, strategically network, or act in powerful and not so humble ways, move faster and more effectively up the ladder. The dirty secret is that your political skills top all else in getting you ahead and driving your effectiveness. This bears no resemblance to the Kumbaya school. That’s why he advocates going beyond Kumbaya and being more of a political beast.
Prior to becoming a professional trainer and a professor at IE Business School, Prof. Wenderoth served 20 years in senior roles with multinationals in China, the US and Europe. If you want to know anything about China, or the Eastern vs Western style of management, he’s your man. His mandarin is as fluent as his Spanish.
Final decision
Prof. Kriti Jain is very concerned about the decisions we take because decisions-makers tend to make judgements without having all the relevant info to hand. Moreover, most of the time, she says, what you see is not what you get …
Prof. Jain specializes in organizational behavior and human resources. Her research focuses on judgment and decision-making. She is particularly interested in developing an understanding of how individuals and groups carry out assessments of future uncertainty, and how personality traits, emotions, and decision frames influence judgments.
Let her tell you how your emotions get in the way of your sense of judgement!
