Success!
I've found my study group! It's a great group and I'm delighted. Unfortunately, Outlook Express ate* the two posts I had prepared about today's experiences, so you're going to have to make do with a summary.

The team-forming exercise began with a milling-around period, followed by a direction to sort of gravitate towards tables that had been set up around the room. I was gratified to see that I had actually done a good job of getting acquainted with potential group members over the last couple of days - quite a change from my younger, shyer self. I found a clot of people I'd met and liked moving towards a table, joined them, and that was it. While we were sharing backgrounds and life stories, other groups were still forming. Every so often we'd ask the facilitating professor what we should do now, and each time he said, "sit tight. We're working some things out" with reference to the other groups. Finally an hour or so later it was done.

What we mainly had in common, we established, was that we'd all sought a group rich in diversity. I think we got it. We are:

• Neeraj, software consultant.
  He has strong entrepreneurial leanings, much like me.


• Dave, housing developer.
  "DON'T BLAME ME. I don't create the demand, I just try to satisfy it."


• Don, satellite systems program manager.
  "I just got certified in sailing and I'm renting a yacht Sunday. Who wants to come?"


• Heather, entertainment executive.
  Unfortunately I don't have a telling quote from Heather, but I think the first question she asked me was whether I'd seen a certain Cary Grant / Irene Dunne comedy. (I hadn't, but I'd seen their other one.)


• Lee, medical researcher and UCLA professor.
  "I don't know accounting, but when the team needs to inject cancer into mice they can count on me."


• Camille, author of What They Don't Teach You in Film School.
  "Oh! I have to tell a story!" (Repeat every 15 minutes . . . unless the story is longer.**)


• Christina, business advisor, accountant, ex- research chemist.
  "My chemistry professor said I was crazy."


• Jon, rocket scientist (literally).
  "I can do pivot tables." (And he owns horses too.)


• ...and me.

It's going to be a good year. And now I can sleep well knowing the team issue has been successfully put to rest.

* this applies even if you don't "send" the message, since leaving it in the Drafts folder is considered equivalent to "sending."
** Camille, you know I mean this affectionately.

Only Monday, and already exhausted
This is worrying - it's only Monday, and already I feel like I'm having trouble hanging on. I woke up at 5am (typical for me) feeling kind of sore all over: too much sitting, I'm sure. I spent about 45 minutes stretching, made some tea, wrote the morning's blog entry, dressed, showered, and got over to breakfast about 7:00. I was the first one there. By the time I finished a handful of other people had shown up and perhaps I should have stayed to be sociable but instead I went back to my room to study for as long as I could before class began.

When class started, our group was chosen as one of the two that would present our findings from the case we'd studied Monday night. We did OK, but the other group knocked it out of the park. Great organization, superior PowerPoint, excellent presentation skills. Whoa.

One long day
I got to Ojai, parked, registered and found that I was early, so I went walking around and the first person I ran into was Ben, the one person I'd met previously since we sat together at the "technology session" in LA a few weeks ago (I arrived late and sat on the very end of the row). Ben's a nice guy who works for Hughes Satellite, is married with children, and has a mixed combination engineering/business background. We get along well. He picked up his books and we went exploring the grounds until the conference center opened.

The Ojai Valley Inn and Spa is very nice -- looks a lot like the Sonoma Mission Inn in style, and apparently dates from the same era -- but the layout's a little weird. We found that getting from building to building often took you off of sidewalk or pathway and instead onto a road used by golf carts and maintenance vehicles. (Later, after I checked in, I found that the main route to my room was to enter the building from up the hill on the 4th floor and then take a small elevator down to the 2nd floor -- which is the bottom level but lacks an exit.)

Wandering done, we wound up back at the conference center where we collected our badges and introduced ourselves to the various program personnel that we hadn't met yet. Other people started arriving, and it was mingling time. It was basically the freshman week dynamic all over again, 20 years later: walking up to people with a big smile, introducing yourself, figuring out what you had in common and trying to guess who will wind up being your friend and who will be a problem.

I had a secondary goal other than general schmoozing: I was trying to find the other Bay Area people, since we might want to form a study group together, coordinate Southwest "Friends Fly Free" opportunities, or just hang out. I didn't find any until later in the day, but by day's end I'd located all of them.

We started with lunch (sandwiches and salad, nothing fancy) outdoors on the patio. I wound up sitting with the dean and his fiancee, and we were soon joined by Rich, an ex-Navy guy I'd met during the mingling, and another fellow who confided that he hadn't done the reading and had thought that the week would be a long orientation session rather than actual classwork. I mentally marked Rich as a potential study group member, and the other one as not.

The first class was a program overview led by the dean, followed by a brief break (coffee and cookies available in the conference lobby, if you hurried) and then an exercise called "the Management Jungle." We were shown a list of animals and, without discussion, sent to another room filled with large circular tables marked for the animals; we were to pick the animal we thought best reflected our management style, establish with the rest of the group the traits that we thought we had in common, and make a presentation to the class.

I was an Owl; we're wise, observant, and watch and think before acting. The Tigers were fast and decisive, but territorial and didn't work well with other Tigers. Horses declared themselves hardworking and great team players. Giraffes are peaceful and have long-range vision. Bears are friendly and pleasant - think Yogi Bear and Gentle Ben - and, so they say, are so efficient that they can get a year's work done in eight months and sleep the rest of the time. Beavers are industrious long-range planners who think the Eagles are uppity, upppity, uppity. Eagles claim both long-range vision and close attention to detail. Nobody likes the Foxes - sly and sneaky - who claim that they are victims of bad PR and are merely fast-moving and quick-thinking.

Among the Owls I quickly identified a few people I thought I could work with, one who was a maybe - smart and charismatic but potentially manipulative, too soon to tell - and one person trying to establish a people-who-matter vs.people-who-don't dynamic within the group. I crossed that one off my list of potential study-group-mates.

Back in class for a bit, then a break to move our luggage into our rooms, then more school, then break for reception and dinner, then back to class again, then breakout into small groups where we analyzed one of our case studies according to one of out authors' analytical frameworks for two hours. Then, at 10:30, back to our rooms and done with class at last.

Can't sleep
I can't sleep. This is not good, because the schedule today goes until 10pm. I've been feeling calm and well-prepared up until now, and now I'm awake wondering what preparatory material I forgot to read, what I haven't absorbed, and how I'm going to manage to meet everyone and find a simpatico study group to work with. It's freshman anxiety all over again, and I wasn't expecting it.

Tonight I'm staying at my friend Martha's house in Sherman Oaks - just a few minutes away from UCLA, in fact, though it's Ojai, not UCLA, where I need to be later this morning. I had planned to start driving Friday night or early Saturday morning to get to Ojai by Sunday, and hadn't bothered to make any room reservations because my fantasy of the open road involved dawdling here and there and then getting a room whereever I happened to find myself at the end of the day on Saturday. This was based on an extremely naive assumption: that there'd be rooms available. On a Saturday night in August, just about everything from Buellton and Solvang down to Ventura is sold out. I'm sure that with sufficient persistence I could have found something, somewhere, but after a fair amount of searching and phoning for motels I called Martha on the off chance that she'd be home and available to take in strays. She was, and an hour later I was at her door.

As long as I'm up, I guess I'll try to take notes on some of the case studies we're discussing this week.