Global Leadership Lab at Georgetown
The 21st of September was a not a usual day for Atlas Corps. On this day, the Global Leadership Lab (GLL) was held at Georgetown University, one of the most prestigious universities in the United States. The lecture was insightful, engaging and the speaker maintained the audience’s attention throughout.
It is no easy feat to keep more than 100 people engaged throughout a whole day. Over the course of the lecture, I tried to elicit how the speaker was able to do so. Based on my observations, he used some interesting techniques to capture the audience’s attention. For example, by recounting interesting stories and jokes – some about former president Clinton, others about former president Obama and some even about the audience themselves –, maintained the audience’s attention through the whole session. In addition, posing questions, challenging the audience, and administering short quizzes were all great ideas. This challenged the audience in an appropriate way and provided surprising responses and results. Other techniques that the speaker used were through showing unexpected statistics about the number of municipalities in the Netherlands, the meat price in China, or the number of books borrowed by a library in Norway. That definitely caught our attention. Further, the multimedia content was impressive and the videos were interesting. The images that he showed were intriguing in that they and challenged the audience to think carefully, to pay attention to details, and to engage in the discussion.
In closing, the lecture was insightful, not only because the topic was interesting, or because it was held at Georgetown, or because the logistics were excellent; it was great, because the human component was amazing. By having people from all over the world in the same room provides an amazing opportunity to experience different cultures and perspectives. Plus, by having a great lecturer who is an expert in the topic, someone who is able to take his time to study the audience, and who is able to communicate his message in an outstanding way, produces a great lecture that will be unforgettable.