It was a great honor to have Professor Neal Hartman to conduct the first lecture to the fresh IMBA students.
Professor Neal Hartman is a Senior Lecturer in Managerial Communication at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
The lecture was a perfect mix of solid suggestions and case discussions. In the first half session, Professor Neal elaborated how to prepare and participate in the case classes, which covers from individual level such as individual preparation to team collaboration, including team preparation, participation strategies and tactics. Besides, Professor Neal also advised us to always listen actively to what others are talking about as well as to use phrases such as “to further build on…”, “to add on…”, “I would like to share my point of view from a different perspective…” when articulating our thoughts in order to facilitate the group discussion. On top of that, Professor Neal also provided some constructive food for thoughts on how to read various cases for different courses. For example: focusing on the notes in financial sheet when it comes to Accounting course while focusing on method and reasoning for DMD course; Understanding how the numbers are derived is very important in Economics, etc. In between, students were encouraged to raise questions and to participate in the discussion. Professor Neal used his humor with exact scenario examples that instilled more vividness to the lecture. In the second half session, we were divided into small groups to analyze the pre-prepared case, which requested everyone to apply what we have learned in the first session into real practice. The professor ended the lecture with discussion with us on our reflections to this particular lecture topic. It was indeed a very fruitful and engaging lecture.
As we all know already that group case study is a very common way of learning for all MBA students. As Professor Neal mentioned during the lecture, everyone would need to embrace certain capabilities in order to get more out of it and we are pretty sure that what we learned from this lecture would benefit us a lot in the next two-year MBA study journey.
Lastly, since it was also Teacher’s Day today, we also extended our hospitality with a special but meaningful gift to Professor Neal. The gift symbolized harmony, which also indicated how we appreciated cultural exchange among different countries.
Written by 2016 IMBA TIAN Miao
September 12th, 2016
