Arthur Kroeber

So the cumulative effect of personal experiences can be gigantic, right?

Particularly if it is like extended over time.

It's really, really important.

And then the impact of these more structured engagements, right?

Yeah.

So you go as a tourist, you talk to some taxi drivers, you see this and that.

What do you learn?

Well, I'll give you a concrete example.

So one of my side gigs is for a number of years, I taught a executive MBA course at NYU on China's economic rise.

And

You know, what that meant for companies and so forth.

And usually I have about 20, 25 people in the class.

And I taught it for three or four years before COVID.

Four years, I guess.

And then two or three years after COVID started.

And...

In the years that I taught it before COVID, there were always reliably four or five people in the class that had spent some time in China, and many of them had done so just as part of this executive program, because part of what you got by signing up for this EMBA is that they took you on these global study tour trips, and you would go to this country or that country, and you would be there for a couple weeks, and you would talk to a few companies and this and that.

It's pretty superficial, right?

But what I found was that when I had a class that had a few of these people sprinkled in that had that experience or a little bit of work experience or they'd gone as a tourist, had some kind of like a student experience or something.

The class discussions were always much more nuanced, and people did not retreat into these sort of cartoon stereotypes of what China was like, because everyone who had been there could say, well, actually, it was a little bit different because here's my personal experience, right?