The course was Leadership and Management of Organization fondly known as LAMO (the obligatory Organizational Behavior course in the MBA program), taught by our newly minted fresh OB Professor Sheena Iyengar. Sheena was young, hip and inspirational; a teacher who broke so many stereotypes on day one when she walked in with her white cane in our class room.
There were six of us in the original group, all from very different backgrounds. Alyssa Mishcon, Stephanie Mowatt, Kris Stookey, Dan Treinish, Lawrence Wong and Jawwad Farid. A CPA, a product manager, a media specialist, an analyst, one completely crazy movie producer from Hong Kong and yours truly, locked in a breakout room till we figured out what we really wanted to do.
It had to be something interesting for a change rather than a typical lame OB project. I had spent my first term at the Columbia Business School library discovering the Stacks – the entire book and periodical collection of the school, spread across 4 floors of stackable shelves (hence the name stacks) and had found Harvard Business reviews and Fortunes dating back before the second world war. For some one always fascinated by business literature, it was discovering a treasure trove. When we sat down and looked at the number of things we could do together, examining media perception of leadership over decades sounded interesting. Here is the research paper that we submitted ten years ago and that shaped my own personal style of managing an organization.
Leading and Managing Organizations
Attributes of Good and Bad Bosses Over Time
August 4, 1999
Group Project
