Thu, Oct 3, 2024 | Updated 3:17PM IST

Int’l speakers discuss student life and team building

Times of Bennett | Updated: Feb 18, 2023 18:07
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By Shubh Bharadwaj


Under the Institution’s Innovation Council initiative of the Ministry of Education, two international speakers were invited to address students in an online interaction on Friday. The two speakers were Anita Williams Woolley, Associate Dean of Research at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business, and François Ortalo Magné, Dean and CEO London Business School.
While Ms Woolley spoke on ‘Building collectively-intelligent start-up teams’, Mr Magne spoke to the students about ‘Being a student today and tomorrow’.
The online session was divided into two segments with Ms Woolley addressing the students first.
In her address, she spoke about team building and how teams should be selected keeping in mind the objectives and what the team plans to achieve.
She said that a team consisting of diverse members with varied skills would always achieve the set target and work better as compared to homogenous teams since each member contributes their specific quality in the team.
She also spoke about two types of teams – the first being process-oriented and the second being outcome-oriented.
She said that the process-oriented teams identify the process of the desired task and work on it, while the outcome-oriented teams focus on the outcome they want from the exercise and work in a reverse manner as compared to the process-oriented teams.
Ms Woolley also spoke about setting realistic goals which can be achieved. “Clear and specific goals result in the goal being achieved. Vague goals should be avoided and similarly goals should be aligned with the target one wants to achieve. Impossible goals should not be set and expected to be completed,” she said.
The second session was taken by François Ortalo Magné, Dean and CEO London Business School, who spoke about ‘Being a student today and tomorrow’.
Mr Magne spoke about the art of forgiving others and being open to new ideas.
He shared a personal experience of a podcast he was listening to and how it changed his perspective of life. The podcast mentioned how one can learn to look the other way, control anger and pass a warm smile to their colleagues or mates.
He asked the attendees to take time to reflect upon themselves and handle certain situations better and “think how one can learn and convert the knowledge.”
He laid emphasis on how one should not work continuously as it decreases productivity and outcome and advised that one should take time off work and rest.
He pointed out that we are born at a time when life expectancy is increasing, so it’s not necessary for students to work in a single organisation as they have ample time.
He motivated students by saying that it’s the demonstration of efforts which matters and being wrong sometimes is okay and perfectly normal.

(The writer is a Semester IV student of BA (Journalism and Mass Communication) programme.)