Why the students look more beautiful than usual
From a partly navel gazing article on how Harvard Business School is trying to actually see if it can advise itself on how to survive. Or, alternatively can devour itself. Warning: contains disruptive innovation memes. I just thought the following was a new variation on the usual images that University prospectuses use (sex mix, ethnicity mix, quadrangle, new glass covered ‘you can see everybody’ building etc).
Professor Christensen did something “truly disruptive” in 2011, when he found himself in a room with a panoramic view of Boston Harbor. About to begin his lecture, he noticed something about the students before him. They were beautiful, he later recalled. Really beautiful.
“Oh, we’re not students,” one of them explained. “We’re models.”
They were there to look as if they were learning: to appear slightly puzzled when Professor Christensen introduced a complex concept, to nod when he clarified it, or to look fascinated if he grew a tad boring. The cameras in the classroom — actually, a rented space downtown — would capture it all for the real audience: roughly 130,000 business students at the University of Phoenix, which hired Professor Christensen to deliver lectures online.