Sunday night, I received a very reassuring email from my boss. She said “Adam, I don’t expect you to answer emails on weekends” after I had sent her a file that evening. This was nice to read, as I like to let my weekends be my own personal time, but I sometimes feel guilty when I arrive at the office on Monday morning and someone says “did you see my email?” and I have to answer “not yet.” But this email from my boss reminded me that my weekends ARE my own, and that my life is more than my job.

I feel like many of my peers are letting their careers define them. And if you asked many of my “distant friends” (those friends from college who you are still connected to on Facebook, but who you haven’t seen in person in at least a year for whatever reason) they’d probably describe me as “that social media guy.” As much as I take pride in the fact that my friends, former classmates, and colleagues come to me when they have a question about how to run the Twitter account for the company they work for, or how to ask for a recommendation on LinkedIn, I worry that this is the only thing they remember me as. (Ok, they might also remember me as the guy who was way too obsessed with theme parks and Pixar movies.)

But I want my peers to think of me as a more multidimensional person. When I think about my group of friends from college, there are a few that I only know as “the guy who works at JPMorgan” or “that girl in law school” because they are completely focused on their carers, almost to a fault. I’m sure their parents are proud of those titles, but I’m far more impressed by my friend who I summarize as “the girl who works in production at Macy’s who is teaching herself violin” or my other friend who is “an operations manager at a theatre festival who I run into at SoulCycle all the time.”

So yesterday I thought a lot  about what I want my friends to define me as. No, I thought about what I want to define MYSELF as. I don’t want my personal elevator pitch to simply be “I work in social media.” I want it to reflect a complete person, and not just an office job. If I had my way, people would know me as:

• An athlete
• An adventurer
• An academic

And I’m working towards these characteristics by…

Republished from The Digital Careerist, continue reading the article in full here.

If you haven’t failed at anything by the time you read this sentence, then we at Hult Labs urge you to share your secret for continued success in the comments section below. But I’d bet the $20 in my pocket (or the mocha on my desk) that you’ve dealt with failure at some point in your life and career – and probably more than once. I’m also willing to bet that after the sting of failure receded somewhat you realized that you had learned a thing or two, and that your ability to bounce back each time was a bit faster and better still, a bit easier.

But before it can get easier, there’s no evading the baptism by fire that only failure can bring in school, at work, and in life. In 2010, Guillermo Sanchez Jr., just out of business school only two years, was tapped by his family’s business to lead a brand new venture. Based in Monterrey, Mexico, Sanchez was tasked with piloting a new outsourcing service for a client, an IT distributor, in Texas. The economic environment at the time was still clouded by the recent financial crisis, and the exchange rate between the US Dollar and Mexican Peso fluctuated wildly on a daily basis. Both sides signed a contract that included a fixed exchange rate for services – one that Sanchez began to regret when the Mexican economy soon rebounded.

“Even though we were meeting the client’s expectations, having an exchange rate that wasn’t aligned to reality was making us lose a lot of money,” said Sanchez. “Not only that, but we started having problems recruiting because we could only offer below market rates. It was a big failure. We nearly had to close shop the very first year.” Mother Nature had also played a role: when Hurricane Alex hit Monterrey in June of 2010, the powerful storm brought the city to a standstill, and displaced Sanchez’s team for three months.

It was only when Sanchez approached the client to discuss the impending failure of the project (and his family’s business) that both parties were able to collaborate on what he called a “mutually-designed solution.” Prior to the sit-down, Sanchez had also learned firsthand how the “blame game” only served to obscure a real, workable solution for everyone involved. “Failure can come due to unpredictable factors and not be anybody’s fault. Thus, finding who to blame is not only harmful, but it is also often pointless,” he said.

In his article “Make Failure Your Greatest Asset,” Ted Coine asserts that the experience of failing is critical because it helps us to develop “one of the most important traits a leader needs to be successful: empathy.” But you don’t just have to take Coin’s word for it. Business schools are beginning to recognize that successful graduates need more than “the chops” to get things done; they need essential skills like persistency, resilience and empathy. Because the business world highly values these skills, business schools are now also looking for them in prospective students.

In the article “B-Schools Know You Think, but How Do You Feel?,” Melissa Korn writes that “schools are trying to choose from a crowded pool of well-qualified applicants and get a sense of the human being behind the application by adding personality tests and…in-person interviews to the traditional battery of essays, transcripts and recommendations. Now, prospective M.B.A. students need to shine by showing emotional traits like empathy, motivation, [and] others.”

As business schools experiment with ways to measure “softer” skills among applicants and students (and figure out how to help students develop these skills further) one thing is clear: assessment tools may show students where they stand in the moment, but they don’t offer an action plan for improvement. What’s a surefire way to improve your levels of resiliency and empathy, among others? You have to take risks and you have to fail. Rinse and repeat. Forever. And that’s OK.

“Everybody tries to avoid failure,” said Sanchez, after recounting the story about the project that nearly failed. “Risk is inherent in business. If you try to avoid risk, you’ll never get any business done. If we had waited until circumstances were perfect, we would have never started our test pilot. Sometimes you win, and sometimes you don’t, and that’s fine, as long as you keep trying.”

Did the near-failure of the project lead him to feel a greater degree of empathy? “I’d like to think so,” said Sanchez. “I learned a lot about risk from business school, but in a very abstract way. I learned how to quantify it, but not how it feels or how to face it. It definitely took being in a real world situation to learn about risk and failure more personally. It is more valuable to know oneself in the face of failure than to calculate a probability. I would advise students to try out new things that are hard and fail constantly until they succeed so that the learning never goes away.”

So, in a sense, failure can be our ally, right? And maybe if we look at it that way we could think about deliberately courting it from time to time, carefully at first, and then more brazenly over time. Because maybe if we get to know it a little bit better we don’t have to be so scared when it comes to visit. Instead of running and hiding, we can sit it down for coffee and a good talk. Maybe we’d invite failure to come around more by being more willing to take smarter, riskier bets in our jobs and in our lives. And if we pay attention, maybe failure would teach us that we are more capable, resilient, and creative than we ever imagined.

About a year ago, writer Neil Gaiman gave a commencement address at the University of Arts in Philadelphia in which he told the graduating class: “When things get tough, this is what you should do: Make good art.” Quick interjection: you don’t have to be an artist for the aforementioned words to resonate. Substitute whatever your passion is wherever the word “art” appears, and it should hit home. Back to Gaiman: “Husband runs off with a politician — make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by a mutated boa constrictor — make good art…Make it on the bad days, make it on the good days, too.” Through life’s slings and arrows (and rainbows and rose gardens), make the commitment to persevere no matter what.

So it’s in the spirit of professional and personal growth that we’ll conclude with another rousing, if not failure inducing, Gaiman quote. “If you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re Doing Something. Whatever it is you’re scared of doing, Do it. Make your mistakes, next year and forever.”

Photo courtesy of Stock Monkeys.com.

The idea of “doing good while doing well” is hardly new. But the Y Generation’s response to it is different. They are literally taking on a youth revolution that extends from one part of the world to the other, while changing the conversation around social good and entrepreneurship.

My colleague Ahmad Ashkar, founder and CEO of the Hult Prize, one of the world’s leading platforms for social change, would be the first to agree—and has pointed to three major reasons why the youth revolution is taking place: 1) Information communication technology is interconnecting youth from around the world; 2) Corporations are being forced to consider social impact; and 3) Academic institutions—having caught blame in the recent financial crisis—are forced to rethink what they teach.

The school, which was renamed to Hult International Business School in 2003, has grown from less than 70 students on one campus in Cambridge, Mass., to around 3,000 students across five campuses located in Boston, San Francisco, London, Dubai and Shanghai. Hult is also expanding into new and emerging markets, and recently opened a “rotation center” in São Paulo—where a student can take electives after completing the first six months at one of Hult’s home campuses. In 2014, it will also open a new rotation campus in New York and double its capacity in Boston, where the school currently offers a one year intensive MBA and MIB (Master of International Business).One academic institution that has taken a leading position on the topic of doing good and doing well is Hult International Business School—formerly the Arthur D. Little School of Management, which is why I am very proud to work as dean of its founding Boston campus.

Hult International Business School is one of few business schools that has taken on the concept of doing good and doing well with an array of programs and resources dedicated specifically to action and impact. The business school offers a dedicated master’s degree program in Social Entrepreneurship. (A social entrepreneur is someone that launches social enterprises, or businesses, that focus on both social and financial return.) Each of the students in Hult’s one-year master’s curriculum is taught fundamental values that differentiate them from your average business student.

The school’s teaching principals are based on Action Learning. The concept was pioneered by Arthur D. Little in the mid-1940s and has since been adopted by some of the most prestigious schools in the world, including Harvard Business School and Stanford University.

Action Learning implies that students typically work in teams solving real-life challenges. The professor works primarily as a facilitator of learning with strong emphasis on reflection throughout the learning journey. As a business school, Hult believes in practical hands-on learning rather than purely theoretical business knowledge. The faculty members are real-world practitioners and students work on business challenges and projects throughout the year. The goal is to nurture and enhance business acumen among students to ensure they can plug back in to the business world immediately after graduation.

It was also this action-based curriculum that led to the inspiration for what has become one of the world’s leading platform for social enterprise as well as the world’s largest student competition for social good: the Hult Prize.

As a Hult International Business School MBA student, Ahmad Ashkar came up with the concept after listening to Charles Kane, the founder of local Cambridge-based, One Laptop per Child, speak about game-changing innovation at the bottom of the economic pyramid. Ashkar, having had no previous experience in social entrepreneurship heard Kane talking about selling products to the poor as a means to solve poverty. The concept of selling a product to someone who made less than $2 a day grabbed the attention of Ashkar who, had spent the majority of his pre-MBA career as a real estate banker. It was then that Ashkar had his “ah ha” moment. He had to raise awareness around the topic of social entrepreneurship and create a platform where his peers from around the world could also be introduced to this novel concept. If this group of students from around the world were going to end social challenges, it was certainly going to be through the use of the model that Kane had discussed in class. In the weeks to come, Ashkar was able to convince Kane to help him construct the prototype for what is now known as the Hult Prize.

In the past four years, the Hult Prize has grown into a global initiative and is often referred to as the “Nobel Prize for youth.” The annual contest, which is fully sponsored by Hult

International Business School and run in partnership with President Clinton and the Clinton Global Initiative, brings together more than 10,000 participants who submit their game-changing ideas, aimed at solving one of our world’s most pressing social challenges. Each spring, a global, World Cup-style tournament is hosted by Hult’s campuses in Boston, San Francisco, London, Dubai and Shanghai. At these events, university student teams of five pitch social enterprises to executive judges who fly in from all over the region to help select the winner. Solutions are specifically geared towards a particular topic which President Bill Clinton personally selects each September. Following the regional round, winning teams are then flown into Boston, where they spend two months inside an incubator-like facility, where their new and innovative idea will be turned into full-blown prototype along with the development of an investment ready corporation. Last, a final round of competition is hosted by President Clinton on the first day of the annual Clinton Global Initiativemeeting where the winner is awarded $1 million in seed capital to launch their new company.

So far, this year’s competition has resulted in five global finalists teams (an online winner will also be announced). One of the most spectacular ideas came from McGill University in Montreal. The team, who won the regional final in Boston, proposed reducing food insecurity in urban slums by harvesting and feeding people with high-protein insects and particularly crickets. Meanwhile, the University of Cape Town came up with a prototype of a pre-fertilized, fail-proof seed that can be grown in any climate and with 80% less water than conventional means of farming.

Although it is unclear how much of an impact Hult has had on the students and their ability to solve some of the world’s most critical issues, it has certainly taken an active role in empowering them, while taking the concept of “doing good while doing well” to the next level. The more important question—of whether it will put an end to our most pressing social problems—remains to be seen.

I was in Bangkok, on the last night of a whirlwind 8-country/8-day book promoting tour in Asia. I had been meeting potential students for Hult International Business School when I was momentarily distracted. I looked up at numbers that had been projected on a screen, and I was carried away in a kind of analytical reverie. Maybe the numbers meant nothing—well, statistically I was sure they meant nothing—but I couldn’t help trying to make them tell me a story. The numbers I had been seeing on my tour were beginning to turn my views of Asia completely upside down.

The tour involved a seminar in each city, at which I spoke about my new book, Good vs Good. At each stop, I met between 30 and 60 graduate school-aged men and women who were all considering entering a business degree program. Generally, these potential students were natives of the country where I was appearing—not native English speakers. But all spoke enough English to think they could attend an English-language graduate program, and laughed at the appropriate moments of my English-language speech.

Before arriving at the venue, most of the attendees had filled out a questionnaire asking them to rank the Goods below in the order in which they make decisions. Basically, I was asking them to choose if Equality, for instance, would be a more important consideration than Individuality when making a significant choice.

• Life (health, nutrition, having children, staying alive, nature)
• Stability (routine, safety, rule of law, predictability)
• Relationships (society, nation, community, workplace, family, friends)
• Growth (material well-being, economic success, gainful employment)
• Joy (entertainment, fun, sports, beauty, learning, amusement)
• Belief (religion, spirituality, higher powers, a cause, also akin to honesty)
• Individuality (ownership, privacy, voice, recognition, dignity)
• Equality (rights, sharing, fairness)

In the research for the book, I had learned that an individual’s prioritization of these 8 Goods is almost like a fingerprint. 90% of those who have completed the survey have completely unique orderings of these Goods. The other 10% share their ordering with only one other person. And this pattern has held regardless of culture or nationality.

But I knew—from some previous national surveys—that even though individuals are very different, those of similar cultural backgrounds tend to cluster around the same set of Goods. The Japanese, for instance, are more likely to emphasize Life and Relationships, while Americans tend to base decisions more on Belief and Individuality.

One of the highlights of each evening’s lecture was unveiling the results of the survey for each particular city. But more important than how attendees ranked their own Goods was how they ranked the Goods of those around them. Let me explain why.

The very first piece of sociological research I ever conducted was for my undergraduate thesis, comparing juvenile delinquency in Japan to the United States. I spent a summer riding with a “violence gang” (the direct translation of “motorcycle gang”) in Tokyo, and I designed and administered a survey to high school students in both countries concerning their propensity to commit wrongful behaviors. In the draft stage of the survey, my advisor had deftly corrected one of my survey questions, which straightforwardly asked participants if they committed illegal acts, like using marijuana. My advisor explained that teenagers were unlikely to admit in a survey that they smoked pot, but if I phrased the question differently I could get a pretty good idea of aggregate behaviors in any given school. He recommended I write the question as: “Out of your ten best friends, how many use marijuana?”

Based on the results I had seen during my Asia book tour, I had come to believe that the question “What are the priorities of those around you” was far more illuminating than “What are your personal priorities.” The “those around you” question was giving me an aggregate view of what each audience thought about their native society. And the results were surprising.

Here’s a list of the cities in which I held seminars (in my travel order), and the top three priorities of “those around” the participants (the percentage of respondents is also noted). So for instance, at the first tour stop, you can see that 33% of my audience in Beijing listed Joy as the top Good of the people around them, while 18% thought Belief and Growth were the top Goods of people around them.

Beijing:  Joy (33%);   Belief (18%);   Growth (18%)

Seoul:  Relationships (27%);   Growth (18%);   Joy (18%)

Tokyo:  Relationships (27%);   Stability (27%);   Life (27%)

Taipei:  Relationships (59%);   Growth (17%);   Stability (8%)

Manila:  Life (44%);   Growth (17%);   Belief (17%)

Singapore:  Stability (30%);   Relationships (30%);   Individuality (30%)

Jakarta:  Growth (35%);   Life (35%);   Joy (12%)

Bangkok:  Relationships (35%);   Growth (17%);   Equality (13%)

You can see that Relationships looms large in these results, as it did in a random sample of 1000 Americans I completed last year, where the ranking of the Goods for “those around you” looked like this: Life (25%), Relationships (21%), Growth (16%), Belief (13%), Joy (9%), Individuality (6%), Stability (5%) and Equality (4%).

But with the exceptions of Taipei and Bangkok where Relationships far outstrip the other contenders percentage-wise, in Seoul, Tokyo and Singapore it’s in a close race with the other top Goods. Book after book written about Asian cultures have noted that Relationships (or depending on your language, gwanxi, konne, gwangye, wongswan, etc.) are the keys to business and life in the region—so no surprises here.

I was, however, interested to see that Life did not rank more highly than it did (in my survey of Americans, Life just nosed out Relationships). Manila was the only Asian city where it was ranked, by far, as the most important Good. But in Jakarta and Tokyo, Life tied for first place on the rankings of “Most Important Good”. Perhaps Life’s lower ranking was because of the average young age of my audiences—most in the crowd had not reached the life stages of parenting and elder-care that can make people value Life more highly.

Still, it was the ranking of the other Goods that I found to be the most surprising. Stability got first place votes in Singapore and Tokyo (the only two developed nations on the trip). Growth, by contrast, was among the top three Goods in all the cities except Tokyo and Singapore. Joy showed up as number one in Beijing, and in the top three in Jakarta and Seoul. Individuality and Equality only showed up once each—in third place for Singapore and Bangkok respectively.

Does this mean that Beijingers are more joyful than Filipinos? I’m not sure I’d go there yet. But it does give me a much different view of Beijing than I’ve ever had before. Ditto Singapore, where Growth didn’t qualify for any of the top three spots (but Individuality did qualify for 3^rd place). I was also surprised by the fact that Belief didn’t qualify as a top Good in the only Muslim city on my tour, but it did in Beijing—a bit of mind-twister (my hunch is that maybe survey participants in Beijing were thinking about the honesty definition more than religion, but it certainly begs further digging). Tokyo was the only city that was completely predictable to me.

My analysis of the Goods rankings across all 8 cities has led me to only one conclusion: there is a need for more research. Much more! The numbers have begun to tell a fascinating story, but one with big gaps that only additional data can fill. The initial results are certainly startling enough, however, that they may make people question their stereotypes of certain nations. I’m certainly left questioning my own.

John Beck is the Managing Director of Hult Labs. If you are interested in learning more about his latest book, “Good vs Good”—and how you would rank the 8 Goods—you can go here. For an animated explanation on the Goods, check this out:

The process of looking for a job is not what it was a few years ago, and you can be sure that it will change again, perhaps even more remarkably, in another few short years.

One of the biggest reasons for the recent changes in job hunting is that social media is playing a bigger role – one that will only increase over time. The dos and don’ts of using social media, however, aren’t always straightforward because they can change right alongside rapidly evolving technology. But there are a few good tips to be aware of, not likely to change anytime soon, and although they might seem like common sense – well, they are! And they’re useful to know if you are currently on a job safari, or to save for later when you are.

Our first recommendation may seem obvious, but it can’t be stressed enough: your personal and professional social media contributions (Facebook posts, Tweets, Instagram photos, etc.) can rapidly squelch your chances at great job opportunities if you’re not careful. There are plenty of variations of a particularly relevant adage going around, such as “Don’t post anything you wouldn’t put on the front page of a newspaper,” or “Don’t post anything you wouldn’t want your sweet mother or dear old grandmother to see.” You get the idea. If you wince when thinking of the aforementioned seeing something, refrain from posting it. In the same vein, that Facebook profile picture of you doing a keg stand 10 years ago (or just last weekend) may not matter to some employers, but could be a very big deal for some. Sure, it’s a memorable picture – but for prospective employers, it’s memorable for all the wrong reasons.

Our next recommendation is that you utilize social media tools with rigor. They provide you with a farther reach than you could ever have physically, and they allow you to spread the good word of your skills and professional successes, strengthen your network, and contact potential employers who may not even know that they want you. But there’s a caveat: you need to think carefully and deliberately about how you communicate your professional experience and skills to potential employers (either on a static profile page, or in an introductory email) when they are short on time and you aren’t there in person to add context. The social media tools you use are your electronic proxy.

Here’s a hypothetical scenario to get you thinking in the mode of promoting yourself via social media. Imagine you have the chance to apply for your dream job by advertising your resume highlights with a billboard in Times Square for 72 hours, with just 200 words, one picture, and any format you wish. How would you design your billboard so that the hiring manager for your dream position stops dead in her tracks after viewing it to call you right away with a job offer – or at the very least an interview? What are the words you would choose? What is the visual that you would display? What great things about you and your skill set do you want the world (or at least the good people Manhattan) to know about you?

OK, now look at the social media tools you use for your job hunt the same way. And just like the billboard word limit, there are always parameters, making the words and visuals you choose absolutely vital to the whole process of virtually “putting your best foot forward.” Here’s where Kimberly Maul’s article, “6 Reasons Why Social Media Isn’t Helping Your Job Search” comes in handy. She outlines some very helpful “no-no’s” that could stand in the way of extolling your skill set to a potential employer. While we recommend reading the article in its entirety, we’ve conveniently listed some highlights below.

• Passivity will get you nowhere: “It’s not enough to just have a bare-bones page on LinkedIn or only re-tweet other people on Twitter,” says Maul. Take the time to fully flesh out your profiles and take advantage of the various functionalities these sites offer. Another important point Maul makes: keep your profiles up to date even when you aren’t on the job hunt. These days, some recruiters believe that the best talent is already employed, and they are on the hunt for candidates they can entice into new opportunities.

• Overt online aggression won’t get you anywhere, either: Says Maul, “Don’t taunt people on Twitter who don’t follow you back right away and don’t spam people with LinkedIn requests.” This may seem pretty basic, but you might be surprised by how often people don’t practice online courtesy the same way they might in person.

One more point about LinkedIn requests: don’t send a request without personalizing it. Make the effort to add the requestor’s name, a valediction (the “farewell” at the end of the note, like “best regards”) and your name at the end. And by all means, do not send the request in another language you’re not sure the requestee understands.

I recently received a request from a French business student, but I don’t speak French (unfortunately), and it struck me as a minor failure on his part to build his network in a truly conscientious way (somehow I could still tell that the request was impersonal). Your network is not just about numbers; it’s about the quality of the relationships, and nurturing them in a genuine way – especially in the beginning. Touches of conscientious detail don’t have to take a lot of time, and they can payoff in a big way.

• Online etiquette & politeness matter: “Just because we spend a lot of time on our computers and communicating via email doesn’t mean we don’t need to have real-life people and communication skills,” says Maul. One of the biggest reasons young professionals fail at work is not because they don’t have the core skills to succeed, but because they lack people skills. You could be a genius, but if you are a difficult person to work with – virtually and in person – it’ll be just like dodge ball in the fifth grade: you will be the last one chosen for teams and projects. And, you may not be invited to the after-work social gatherings that help teammates bond. And unless you are a genius with lots of money, you will need a job. And unless that job is being a forest ranger or lighthouse keeper, there is no getting around working with people.

• Think “long-term” vs. “short-term”: “If you expect to find a job in a few weeks just from using LinkedIn, or plan to abandon your online network once your find a job, you’ll likely make a ton of mistakes that will sabotage your job search efforts,” says Maul. There’s another adage floating around about the job hunt that’s worth noting here: the more effort you put into it, the more you will get out of it. But, unless you are a mystic with a knack for predicting the future, you won’t know how long the hunt will take, and it does take perseverance. And keep this in mind, too – all the people you meet on your job search journey are potential members of your network. And if they become a part of yours, don’t drop them like it’s hot (as in failing to respond to requests for introductions and information) when the job hunt is finally over. You want to build a network for life – not for the moment.

Unless you are in the market for a job as an unapologetic provocateur, you will need to be prudent about how you put yourself “out there” in the various social media solar systems in which you’ve established a planetary presence. You want to be perceived by potential employers as a stand out (in a good way) from the rest of the pack, rather than as a crazy lone wolf who can’t play well with others – or is just plain crazy. Social media tools can also help you establish and maintain a strong professional network that will be invaluable to you as your progress in your career. And don’t forget that this requires reciprocation.

Here’s one last hypothetical scenario: think of your social media tools as powerful arrows in your job-hunting quiver. Now imagine reaching for an arrow, one of many you’ve handcrafted yourself. You raise and draw your bow, something you’ve practiced tenaciously, over and over again, and take aim at your target: the job you are seeking. You release the arrow, yet again, but this time you finally hit the center. Bull’s-eye.

Photo courtesy of Rodolfo Novak.

“I am delighted that Marty is joining us as Executive Director. He brings extensive and diverse leadership experience, comes from a family of teachers and is married to one, and views education as being central to his life,” said Chris Holmes, Chief Operations Officer of Hult International Business School.

Manley, an MBA Harvard graduate, former union organizer and Assistant Secretary of Labor under President Clinton, was the CEO of Alibris for ten years and has spent a total of 18 years running businesses in the San Francisco Bay Area. Most recently, he served as Founding CEO of technology start-up RedLink and CEO of Reputation Networks. Both companies are based in the Bay Area.

“For more than a century, risk-takers and innovators have been drawn to San Francisco. It is a town perfectly suited to Hult: fast-paced, forward-thinking, and globally-oriented,” said Marty Manley. “I am deeply honored at the opportunity to help the students and faculty of Hult’s San Francisco campus to transform the lives of talented students from around the world.”

Hult International Business School is the world’s largest graduate business school and currently has five campuses across three continents as well as two rotation centers in New York and São Paulo. The school’s two U.S. campuses are located in Boston and San Francisco.

Hult San Francisco has the school’s largest graduate campus and is home to 580 business students. The school covers 62,000 square feet and is located in Levi’s Plaza in downtown San Francisco. The campus offers an MBA program and Master degrees in international business, international marketing, finance, and social entrepreneurship.

Media Contact:
Jenny Harler, Assoc. Communications Director
Hult International Business School
Email: jenny.harler@hult.edu,
Tel: +44 (0)790 848 01 66
About Hult International Business School
Hult is the world’s most international business school with campuses in Boston, San Francisco, London, Dubai, and Shanghai, and rotation centers in New York and São Paulo. The school offers MBA, Executive MBA, Master and Bachelor degree programs. Hult’s one-year MBA program is ranked 1st in Percentage Salary Increase by The Economist and Top 10 in International Business and International Experience by the Financial Times. For more information, go to www.hult.edu and http://www.hult.edu/en/Campuses/San-Francisco/About-San-Francisco/.

Conducted for Al Aan TV’s Arab Pulse programme, the survey of 760 people highlights a number of important trends: prospective parents value girls as much as boys; and people see women as better communicators and far better colleagues.

But perhaps the most significant finding is that nearly half of the survey’s respondents say they have no preference on their boss’s gender. Man or woman, it makes no difference. More surprising still is that these numbers were culled from a cross-section of UAE society, from Arab and western expatriates to Emiratis.

Gender bias has long been a major setback for economic and social reforms in this region and far beyond. For many years, the UAE identified that challenge and took significant, even bold steps to overcome this bias. Encouraging women to head ministries, be speakers of the Federal National Council or head executive offices – the idea was to allow these changes to trickle down and affect people’s perception of women as capable leaders. In this sense, the positive responses are not unexpected.

Nonetheless, for nearly half of the survey’s respondents, there remains much work to be done.

Gender equality is a never ending ideal, and there is no survey that will suggest the work is complete. Amanda Nimon Peters, dean of Hult International Business School Dubai, says that what’s needed now are initiatives that “shape or change people’s perceptions”. She’s right. Even now there are people who would hesitate to accept a job if their boss was a woman. In some professions, workers can also be biased against female managers.

Read more: http://www.thenational.ae/thenationalconversation/editorial/halfway-there-in-push-for-true-gender-equality#ixzz2Saz0cDOk
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The Hult San Francisco team members accept their awards after winning the regional round of the Hult Prize competition in March. Team members, from left: Saul Minkoff, Mandy Vidalis, Karl Oskar Teien, Charles Ojei, and Niketa Malhotra.

Winning the regional round of the Hult Prize competition in March was a huge accomplishment for Hult San Francisco’s team. But it was just the first step. After a brief celebratory period following the competition – and lots of excitement across all Hult campuses – the team got to work setting their winning idea, an active food savings plan called Pulse, into motion. They’ve created a Goalfrog campaign to introduce Pulse, explain how it will work, and start fundraising.

Team member and MBA student Saul Minkoff answers some questions about the project, the group’s next steps, and what it’s like to take part in this global competition.

After winning the regional competition, what is the immediate next step you had to take?
Aside from sleeping for about a week after a hectic run up to the regionals, we had to figure out if we were all going to the Hult incubator (which we are), change any rotation plans we had for Module D, and get the process started to rotate to Boston in Module E. We also started to discuss what we could do in the months leading up to finals at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) Annual Meeting in New York that could give us the best possibility of winning the competition, as well as deciding as a team what we would all do in a win/lose situation. We all have the passion and desire to launch the business regardless of the $1 million prize, and we are taking the necessary steps to do that now.

What made you want to start the Goalfrog campaign, and how do you hope it will work specifically for Pulse?
In our meetings, we decided that by the time we presented at CGI we wanted to have an investable business ready, and not just a concept that needed to be turned into a business. We set goals of having conducted a pilot project in our first country, as well as having the mobile platform built, which we need to raise about $30,000 for. Goalfrog is a recently launched start-up that has a section geared specifically towards project funding, which was perfect because it is exactly what we need. We thought about Kickstarter or Indiegogo, but those sites are crowded and don’t cater specifically to what we’re doing. In the spirit of start-ups, we wanted to give a new and innovative idea a shot. The platform is great, and the founders gave us some really sound advice, so it was a no-brainer.

This campaign will be open basically for the month of May – what will you be doing during that time?
We’re all reaching out to our networks, both personal and professional, in hopes that the project raises their interest enough to make a small contribution. We’re also reaching out to press, and asking Hult faculty to spread it around their networks. We strongly feel too that it would be a great branding opportunity for Hult to see us secure the funding and thereby giving us the best shot at overall success. We’re relatively new to all this, so it will be a steep learning curve, but the guys at Goalfrog are also helping us get the word around.

Where will you be conducting your research next month? Who are you planning to interview?
We’re working on proposals to secure partnerships with two organizations that have presence on the ground in India. Those organizations will conduct preliminary research on our behalf in two to three cities. We’re planning on interviewing women in urban slums to find out a little more about their daily struggles, their needs, and if the Pulse program could be of value to them. We plan to re-work our model based on those responses, only then build a beta version of the SMS platform.

When do you go to Boston for the Accelerator?
July 2 through August 15. We will all be back for graduation!

Do you know anything about the other finalists?
Yes, the McGill team from Montreal is planning on growing mass amounts of crickets (which are high in protein) and has created home kits for turning them into flour, and other ingredients. The team from the University of Cape Town in South Africa has the “reel gardening project” which as we understand it has to do with urban farming. The other teams are ESADE from Barcelona, and the Asian Institute of Technology. There will be a sixth team joining us in the finals; however we will only know who they are once the online competition ends mid-May.

How have you been able to maintain the momentum you got from winning?
Coffee and keeping each other accountable. We had a little dip in energy levels for a week or so, but we’ve been keeping busy by meeting big companies in SF who have offered us a ton of advice, NGO’s, and start-ups. Niketa [Malhotra, fellow team member and MSE student] was even invited to speak at an event at NYU Wagner a few weeks ago, where she made a ton of important contacts and came back super excited. If we ever experience a dip in energy, it is soon back to normal after meeting with the likes of McKinsey or Greenstart, or a dinner with [team mentor] Mike Grandinetti… tough to not have any energy around that guy!

How often do you all meet as a team? How are you all continuing to get along?
We don’t always meet as a full team, as we realized we would be more efficient with the “divide and conquer” method. We do meet daily (and constantly) through Whatsapp (instant messenger) or by telling the others to check out the latest addition to our ever-growing Dropbox folder. After spending so much time together we somehow still all get along and love hanging out… as soon as there’s even a hint of tension you can be sure that someone will make a stupid joke or imitate the other’s accent, and all is forgotten. We have to remind ourselves that we’ve accomplished a ton in the last few months and to really savour the moment. We’re five students from Hult who will be presenting at CGI to some of the world’s leaders…unbelievable. How could we not be happy?!

How do you feel about everything coming up this summer, and what will happen with classes?
One word: Excited. Everyone has told us how amazing Boston is, so it’s cool to be able to go there and experience it with your friends, and your team. The MBAs still have to do electives, but the MSEs are having the incubator count as their action project, so they’re happy. Overall we expect an intense six weeks, but it’s a period that will be crucial to the development of Pulse. We know that this is not only an experience of a lifetime, but also the opportunity to work on something that we are passionate about.

The type of person you are – from how you deal with people to the type of work environment you like the most – will influence how you handle change. But the realities of business today mean that disruptive change happens more often, and at a faster clip. As a result, organizations need people who have the ability to thrive in ambiguous situations, and consistently perform at high levels in the face of rapidly changing conditions.

That’s why exploring who you are can be such an important part of handling change well. Are you someone who seeks out change and tries to get ahead of the curve? Or are you someone who runs away from change, hoping it won’t affect you until the last possible minute? If you’re the former, that’s great – but such people are truly rare. If you’re the latter, that’s OK – most of us are like that. After all, change can be very uncomfortable. But learning just a few simple lessons about how to deal with change can make you more comfortable with it, so your first instinct won’t be to run away.

First of all, some definitions. Change management is often defined as “a set of basic tools or structures intended to keep any change effort under control.” But really, we should want to do more than just control change – we should want to make it work for us in the long run by getting people excited by the potential that change can bring, instead of the risks and pain than may accompany it.

While all companies have to deal with change to some degree, some handle it better than others. Starbucks is an example of a recent successful corporate change, with ex-CEO Howard Schultz returning to lead the company out of its financial doldrums. Schultz had the guts to ask the hard questions about why the company had lost its way – choosing to chase new growth and markets while forgetting its core value proposition: a good cup of coffee. As part of his efforts, Schultz shut down all the company’s stores for a few hours to retrain employees on how to make the perfect cup of coffee. There’s certainly more to the story than that, but there’s no doubting that Starbucks’ sales are on the rise again and the company is not looking back.

On the flip side, JC Penney is the most recent example of change gone wrong. Ex-Apple retail chief Ron Johnson came in with big plans to revolutionize the staid retailer the same way he’d done so at Apple, but a lot of things went wrong. Most notably, he failed to get employees on board with his plan for change. From the outside looking in, Johnson never really analyzed what led to his success at Apple; he seemed to assume he could make that same magic happen anywhere. It was a costly assumption.

I believe part of the difference between these two approaches lies within the men who spearheaded the two very different change initiatives. One appears to have reflected on what he really wanted and why he wanted it prior to institutionalizing the change process. The other one, not so much. This gets to the heart of how you can be an effective agent of change: start by understanding who you are, why you want change, and why you think it’s needed. Do this before you attempt to engage others in a change initiative; it will help you determine whether the change you are seeking is truly good or not.

That’s why it’s always worth asking a few basic personal questions before leading others on a change journey. Questions such as: Do I want this change for purely selfish reasons (personal glory, etc.)? Will others perceive it that way, even if it may not be true? Will this change only benefit me, or will it really have benefits for others? Am I open to accepting comments and feedback about the change along the way? Finally, what kind of a process do I want to use for getting others involved to help with the change?

It’s really only once you have answered these questions – to explore your motivations and the primary reasons for why you think a change initiative is the way to go – that you can begin the process of getting others involved.

I believe the art of handling change well is so important that I’ll be teaching a class on the topic later this month at Hult’s San Francisco campus. In order for students to develop the ability to thrive as change agents they must practice leading others through it. The students who take my class will get a chance to practice just that. For those who can’t be a part of my class, I’ll be sharing my students’ insights on handling change during the class on Twitter, so if you’d like to participate, please follow me at @AdamCarstens.

Adam Carstens is Director of Research at Hult International Business School, and a member of the Hult Labs team.

Picture courtesy of m.a.r.c.

The end of the day is fast approaching and the deadline looming overhead, which once felt light as a feather, now has the weight of a stone. Yet all you can think about is: What’s for dinner? Should I stop at the store for bread? Should I consider eliminating bread from my diet altogether? Did I set the DVR for “Game of Thrones?” I really should check that, right now…

All you can think about is anything but what you should be thinking about. All the while, the clock keeps ticking and the analogous stone keeps picking up more weight. Your efforts to whip yourself into a focused, disciplined state of mind fall helplessly short. Is it time to give up? Will that stone (deadline) crush you?

Rather than tell your boss/professor/colleague that you’re just not up to the task, may we suggest “mindfulness meditation?” Even with that deadline looming, it’s a very good use of your precious time. Countless studies have shown that even short periods of meditation can help shift brain waves in a way that greatly reduces the intruding thoughts attempting to gain your full attention. In short, it allows you to focus better.

So what does it take to get this meditation started? It requires that you carve out some time to do nothing, according to Andy Puddicombe, a clinical meditation consultant and former Buddhist monk. You may be thinking, OK – that should be pretty easy. There’s no spreadsheet involved, no meeting, no complex problem to break apart and analyze. Well, not so fast. In a world of constant sensory overload, it can take real effort to disengage from all the electronic devices upon which we’ve become dependant, and to step away from a busy workload. It has become a challenging proposition to do “nothing”. Your mind may tell you that you don’t have time for “nothing”. As strange as it sounds, that’s when you have to tell yourself (firmly) that yes, you do have time! And what may initially seem like doing nothing is actually doing something – but what?

The “nothing” you’ll be doing is actually a form of paying attention, without actively engaging. Puddicombe believes that we need to be better caretakers of our minds, which can help us be at the top of our game more consistently. In his TED Talk last year, he said: “We spend more time looking after our cars, our clothes and our hair…The mind whizzes away like a washing machine, going round and round…and we don’t really know how to deal with that. The sad fact is that we are so distracted that we are no longer present in the world in which we live.” Puddicombe added that we’ve been lulled and conditioned to believe that that’s just the way life is.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Puddicombe says it takes only 10 minutes a day of doing “nothing” to potentially “impact our entire life.”

Alina Tugend composed some helpful tips for getting started. First, locate a quiet space. Focus on something – your breathing, or a picture on a wall. Pay attention to when thoughts come and go, without rendering any judgment on them. Simply notice that they come and go. Puddicombe adds that it’s vital to allow thoughts to bubble up and burst forth. To try and stop them would be a waste of time and energy. Rather, take a mental step back, acknowledge each thought as it shoots across your mind, and make every effort to maintain a relaxed, non-judgmental state. This is, of course, easier said than done.

You may experience anxious thoughts, Puddicombe says, that grow until you feel more anxious than when you first started. Conversely, you may have dull thought after dull thought, which feels boring and unhelpful. Strangely enough, this means you’re on the right path.

Tugend also advises practicing “purposeful pauses” by taking yourself out of “autopilot.” For example, “instead of thinking of a coming meeting while brushing your teeth, focus on the taste of the toothpaste and the bristles and the water.” One more important tip: don’t bury unpleasant feelings if they pop up. Being mindful means acknowledging the good, the bad, and the ugly.

And if you become discouraged, remember Puddicombe’s bottom line: “Meditation offers the opportunity to step back and get a different perspective. We can’t change every little thing that happens to us in life, but we can change the way we experience it. All you need to do is take 10 minutes out of the day to step back and familiarize yourself with the present moment.”

Should you have the ambition of becoming the best meditator of all time, consider this: no one’s really the best at it – not even the Buddhist monks who have been practicing mindfulness techniques for decades. But every time you set out to focus your wandering mind by taking 10 minutes to unplug from the matrix, so to speak, you are one step closer to improving your ability to focus. In a world of constant distractions and temptations, this can be one very valuable technique that can help you in myriad ways, even beyond your professional life. You may find that doing nothing is a very good way to spend your precious time. And before you know it, that deadline is once again a feather.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, founding director of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, has a list of additional techniques here.

Photo courtesy of Ransomtech.