Unmoored

It's funny, how we've all become slaves to routine in our MBA program: we pick up our books, we patiently wait for and then read our syllabi, and we dutifully execute the tasks assigned to us. We listen for the nuance in each class and bend ourselves to the particularities of each professor ("this one looks for detail", "this one wants pretty charts", "this one seems to be barely paying attention"), we hand in our assignments, and we trace our grades on the master curve.

We've all come to expect that expectations will be clearly laid out before us, like a well-drawn map complete with breadcrumbs to follow.

I say all of this is funny because, as working professionals, it is unlikely we find anywhere close to this type of certainty in our everyday lives outside of class. We navigate re-orgs, trans-continental conference calls, ever-changing projects, and shifting management to read the organizational tea leaves; we jump from stone to stone trying to reach the other side of the river without falling in.

There have been classes where our expectations have gone unmet, where they have changed, and where there just haven't been any guidelines. Such is shaping up to be the case in our venture capital class: we have our first major presentation in two days yet no one I've spoken with seems to have the foggiest idea of what it is we will be measured against.

This is causing more than a little unrest among the troops. It's almost midnight as I write this, and my guess is that there are scores of my classmates also up later than they should be, stressing more than they should be, about a little 10-minute presentation coming up Friday afternoon. Blink, and it will be over, and we'll all be on to the next challenge.