Day 11: June 8, 2009

Happy Monday everyone! Breakfast began at 7:00 am this morning and our opening studio session on Strategy Tools was led by Professor Furse. These tools will help our Accelerator teams with their projects for Sony Music and Cisco – Presidio.

Tomorrow we will be presenting our Arrington Vineyards projects and our teams were furiously working on their handouts, presentations, bibliographies, and story boards throughout the day. After spending the rest of the morning working on Arrington, we broke for lunch at 12:00 pm. While a couple of teams had finished their materials in time to have a relaxing lunch, the majority of the program continued to work formulate their ideas on how to create a multi-functional space plan for the winery to use to accommodate larger corporate and social groups.

For a change of pace after lunch, we broke up the groups up into two sections. Teams 1 – 4 joined Professor Michael Lapre for his now famous “Beer Game.” The “Beer Game” is an operations / process flow simulation that aimed to teach students the importance of communicating between different sectors of the process line effectively. While Teams 1 – 4 worked with Professor Lapre, Teams 5 – 8 spent two hours with me as I explained my business philosophy and how I navigated my life from by birthplace in Booneville, MS to where I am today. At 3 pm, the two sections switched and Teams 5 – 8 joined Professor Lapre, while Teams 1 – 4 joined me.

Dinner was served at 6:00 pm and we started Arrington Vineyards team dress rehearsals promptly at 6:30 pm. Once again, each team had 10 minutes to present our core faculty with their expansion idea for the winery. Afterwards, our core faculty provided the team with feedback on how to improve their presentation before they present their ideas to Arrington Vineyard’s judging panel. All of the presentations looked great tonight and I can’t wait to see how our young men and women perform tomorrow afternoon (especially as some of our students chose to stay until 1 am last night to continue to perfect their project!).

Hopefully we will all get a little more sleep tomorrow!

If you want to see our photo library, you may do so at http://picasaweb.google.com/VanderbiltAccelerator

Michael Burcham
Faculty Director, Accelerator 2009