more interesting lectures like yesterday please...

So yesterday was second class in my marketing course. I am finding the course really interesting. The teacher keeps leeds the class in a relaxed and interesting manner. Yesterdays lecture ended up in being a speech for the students of "Catolica" to take care of the opportunity life has given them and to not only take the career path usually set for business students - pursuing the corporate career - but to consider investing and believing in what they are interested in and to dare to try the path of innovation and following their own ideas. It is interesting to see that Business schools here in Chile are facing the same problems as SSE back home, seeing far to many bright entrepreneurial minds drowning in the nondynamical and bureaucratic organizational structures of the big corporate firms. It is also always as inspiring to meet those few tutors that dare to question this and promote an alternative career path.

During this discussion about innovation came also maybe the funniest comment during the whole lecture. The teacher was explaining how good innovations (illustrated by a DJ that with his mixes constructs something new, as opposed to invention illustrated by the professor in the movie Back to the future) always represented a trip of an item, idea or trend, from the alternative ways how a society acts to the mainstream. So an innovator who sees a need for something and mixes two existing things in society creating an innovation will be succesfull when it turns mainstream. And while using examples from the music industry the teacher ended the speech with the comment "and then when you are mainstream, you either snort coke til' you die or donate your money to something good" (freely translated). A sharp and subtle conclusion to an interesting theme that at least helps me getting more interested in the lectures.

I wish we had more lectures like this back home. Or maybe we do, I have just been enrolled in all the boring courses, like listening to old men explaining how different accounting items should be treated in the DCF model. I am so happy I never have to do that again...