Cornell Leadership Trek

I attended our school's annual "Leadership Trek" field trip this past Thursday. The purpose of the trip was basically to empower us (MBA'ers) with the different leadership models that exist, and how we can strive to improve our own leadership skills, both in the workplace, as well as in our community.

On Thursday evening, after 4.5 hours of on the road, our tour bus finally arrived in a small town in upstate New York called Nylack, NY. We spent the night there since our Leadership session started at 8am the next morning.

The first stop that day was at General Electric's Leadership Development Center. This site was remotely located on the top of a hill overlooking a lake. The site was gorgeous. As we're driving up, it felt like we were going on a nice relaxing vacation somewhere out in the woods. This center was developed under GE's late CEO, Jack Welch. As you know, GE is famous for turning out solid, quality business leaders and this was the location devoted to do just that.

Some interesting information I learned:

• GE has 310,000 employees world-wide. Holy Cow! That's A LOT of people. I mean Goldman only had about 20K, and KPMG had roughly 100K globally, and I thought that was a lot. But considering how many people work there, I don't have a single friend who works for GE.
• GE spent nearly $50 million constructing this Leadership Development Center - I can smell the money in the bldg :)
• The current CEO, Jeff Immelt, is only 49 years old.
  
• GE's consolidated annual revenue is $132 BILLION (!!!)
  

In the presentation, we talked a lot about GE's way of training leaders in their orgnization and how they reward and retain these people. They have over a dozen different types of leadership rotation program which all sounded like an awesome opportunity. Listening to all this talk about developing leaders really made me think about going after a leadership rotation program next year after I'm done with business school. Hmmm...

Overall, I had a fantastic time on the Leadership Trek, and learned a great deal. The Trek was very well organized by my very own classmates.

Some Pictures from GE:


In the afternoon, we took our tour bus to the US Academy at West Point. Yup, the famous West Point army school. Right after I got off the bus, I noticed all of the nice historic looking bluding with different groups of cadets outside. The place was pretty impressive as well. We got a nice tour of the campus and aw bunch of cadets in training.

Overall, I have to say, this Leadership Trek was very well organized and I've got more out of it then I expected.

West Point Museum



Some of the Cornell Leadership Trek Team



Army Cadets:

3 weeks and counting

The weather was ridiculous this weekend. It started out with sunshine early Saturday morning, but gradually got worse and worse as the weekend progressed -- with heavy rain and thunderstorm late saturday evening. There was even a chance of snow today according to weather.com!?!?! I know, pretty ridiculous right? It's days like this that I miss sunny California.

Nevertheless, this was one of those typcal weekend in Ithaca. So I finally got to see the movie "The Amittyville Horror" movie this weekend. It wasn't as scary as I thought it would be but I did enjoy the movie. The next movie I want to see is "The Interpreter".

Check out my friends, Yuko and Kinyoshi's blog. [Note Kinyoshi's blog is in Japanese]

Some interesting sites I've found:

Craiglist meets Google map

Yagoohoogle (Try searching for something)

Sidestep Travel Site (pretty impressive travel site)

Creates your own Anime Movie

random babble...

As my first year at Cornell is quickly winding down to an end (4 more weeks!), I am left with a sense of bittersweetness. On one hand, I can't believe how quickly the last 8 months has passed by. It seemed like it was only last month that I was (painfully) trying to relocate myself half way across the world from Tokyo to Ithaca....giving away anything and everything i owned on the way in order to make my move easier... but later finding out that I had to essentially buy back most of the same stuff I gave away a week before.

But on the other hand, the cold harsh winter months of Ithaca has really made it feel like eternity here (afterall, what doesn't kill you will only make you stronger). Now that I'm almost half way done with my MBA program, I'm excited to start my internship this summer in Hong Kong. Hong Kong is definitely one of the cities that I trully would not mind visiting year after year. Although I like visiting HK, working there might be slightly different. Just like how it was in Japan when I first moved there, it will be a challenge initially to adapt to the way people work there. But I'm always up for a good challenge -- especially one that has to do with moving to a new country.

With all these moving and traveling to different countries in the last 6 months, for once in my life, I can honestly admit that I'm simply tired from travelling. I'm not sick of it but just temporarily tired. Giving myself a break from travelling might not be a bad idea at this point... so maybe I'll just stay in LA and get my well needed r&r until my HK internship starts in June [of course, via Tokyo for a week or two =) ] But again, everytime I'm on the internet, I find myself searching for great travel deals... could this be a psychological problem?

[Mental Note] : Things I need to take care of before moving out of Ithaca for the summer:

• Complete paperwork for summer sublet (yes, i found a sublet-er!)
  
• Finish my Term Project for Valuation Principles class
  
• Finish my Final project for Financial Modeling class
• Coordinate with roommy in regarding moving logistics
• Book air tix to HK/JP

random pictures for your enjoyment...

Hokkaid, JP - w/Friends in Japan, February 2004

negotiation class

right now, i'm sitting in my group negotiation meeting for my negotiation class.. i'm the "process observer" for this particular case and basically what that entails is for me to sit and observe how each team negotiate with each other. its not too exciting but i should be paying more attention.. the negotiation is starting to heat up in here..

have i mentioned how great the weather has been the last few days?!? it's FANTASTIC with the temperature in the 60's and 70's. but i think today is probably the last day for the sunny weather because according to weather.com, starting tomorrow the temperature will drop with high possibility of rain.

back to my negotiation class.... blog more later ;)


Picasa is pretty awesome! I'm testing it out right now... Here's some random pictures i've uploaded using the simple, no-brainer Picasa app:

Jamaica - March 2005

Ithaca- w/b-school friends, December 2005

Testing 1 2 3...

My friend, Haeran, just created her blog which triggered me to start my own. I've been wanting to start one for awhile but never got around doing it... so this is my first attempt at keeping a blog.