Much of a standup comedian’s toolkit is useful in teaching
invite Obeid to collaborate with us in France won the School’s pedagogical innovation award in January 2019, the ‘Inspiring Guest’ project was born. The overarching idea was simple: invite an accomplished, inspiring personality from outside the world of business academia to work with us on creating engaging educational material. The devil, of course, was in the details. How do we prepare in advance for the guest’s visit while leaving room for spontaneity? How do we get faculty buy-in? What do we do if things go wrong? The core team for the project consisted of two professors and two pedagogical engineers, but as its scope grew, more staff got involved. To get more faculty interest, we organised a workshop explaining the still-developing concept in May 2019. After several scheduling issues, we programmed Obeid’s visit for one week in September 2019, just as the academic year was starting. We had plans to record half a dozen videos, as well as to run a faculty workshop with Obeid, a standup show for faculty, students and administration, and a free day to follow up on any ideas that may emerge in the course of our in-person collaboration. While we did our best to prepare for Obeid’s visit, it was always clear that any number of things could go wrong – and many did. But on the flipside, wonderful things happened that we could not have anticipated. This is the nature of creative endeavours – to realise their potential, it is crucial to embrace their inherent riskiness from the start (more on this later).
SAMMY OBEID is a US-based comedian, best known for his 1,001-day streak of consecutive comedy performances. He appeared on NBC’s America’s Got Talent and became the first comedian to perform on the Food Network in Throwdown with Bobby Flay. He was also profiled in TIME Magazine , followed soon after by an article in the New York Times . His debut album, Get Funny or Die Tryin , was named a Best Comedy Album of 2013 by iTunes. Obeid is also a host for the Netflix show, 100 Humans , and founded his own comedy enterprise, KO Comedy.
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AMBITION | Be in Brilliant Company
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