Alchemy is the ancient art and science of morphing base metals into valuable, highly sought-after objects. It involves turning iron, zinc, lead and copper into gold, a metal of universal currency and value. Alchemy is well documented in various ancient cultures and those who were once supposedly privy to it were presumably very wealthy individuals. However, modern science largely considers ancient alchemy an impossibility and is only thought of as a spiritual metaphor for explaining the transmutation of imperfect, ephemeral beings into something akin to perfection.
In a similar vein, I claim to have discovered the process of reversing alchemy in my first 90 days at Ivey. When our first term began here, we were flooded with assignments and quizzes, pre-class and post-class reflections, a ton of asynchronous material and cases, a lot of cases. There were also exams, group projects, some that spanned 90 days and others that we only worked on over a weekend. The staggering amount of material we covered, businesses we scrutinized, leaders we critiqued, strategies we devised and the networks we built with our peers during the term led to us to discover small, golden nuggets of wisdom every step of the way.
As we collected these ‘golden’ nuggets, it seemed to me like they were discordant notes taken out of context from a melody not quite known. How was I to take all of these insights and bring them together in one clean sweep for running and improving businesses? What's the journey like from picking up small golden nuggets to accumulating a golden mountain?
I never figured those questions out, perhaps I will by the end of the program. Though I believe I’ve discovered something even more valuable because of the way the program is designed and because of my special interactions with my peers. I noticed that towards the end of the term I became more comfortable with applying what happened in class to my life. I began discussing marketing strategies, share prices and the S&P500 index over lunch, and learnt leadership principles from a movie starring Matt Damon and Morgan Freeman, changing forever what I know about good leaders and good movies, and was asked to think about applying operations management to my daily routine by creating a process flow, and to design think my life as a way to better manage my future career.
What made this possible? Ivey's pedagogy - to teach it the way it's applied, teaching it through a case. In other words, by applying insights to real world situations - we began to carve tools and devices from golden nuggets we had previously collected. These tools, keys to unlocking greater value were as utilitarian and robust as tools made from iron, zinc, lead and copper. We had managed to reverse alchemy, by learning to take golden nuggets of wisdom, and effectively turning them into brass tacks.
My first 90 days at Ivey were nothing short of spectacular. As I await the start of the second term I do so with a box full of tools and a handful of golden nuggets, knowing fully well I'll be able to turn the latter into the former.