The Fall term is coming to an end now. It was a historic term for me. Paria and I had a beautiful marriage ceremony in October, and we got to visit the US for the first time in November. I attended the INFORMS conference in Charlotte, NC and the SEA conference in Washington DC (Thanks to Peter Lewin for mentioning my work on the famous organizations and markets blog!). The Fall term was also the first time I taught a class in Canada as the main instructor. It was a Strategic Management class for third year BBA students in the Schulich School of Business.

The official course description is rather uncreative in my opinion. I would add this to the description: This course is for you if you have ever wondered why McDonald’s sells Coke but not Pepsi and KFC sells Pepsi but not Coke, why Apple’s Think Different campaign worked so well, why Microsoft never got the amazing Courier project out to market (tears…), why IBM celebrates its history like this, why Woot was so happy to be acquired by Amazon it made this video, and why money is not everything for knowledge workers.

The links in the above paragraph are to videos I showed in class, which students really loved, and were much more exciting than someone lecturing bullet points and helped all of us stay awake early in the morning. The kind of description I have suggested above, is inspired by a description of a physiology course that said “This course is for you if you have ever wondered why you blush at the telling of a rude joke, why your grandfather must sit upright in order to sleep, why your grandmother finds your music annoying, why your boss no longer remembers your name, why infants are wrapped in blankets even on a warm day, why beans give you gas or why tea makes you pee.”

This means that my innovation in coming up with a description for the strategic management course was actually kind of a remix, but pretty much everything is a remix, which is also a wonderful set of videos I used for class…