economist luncheon...

Today I experienced one of the most interesting and serendipitous afternoons of the entire year at Oxford. As a follow up to the Media conference a few weeks ago, the CEO of the Economist group approached one of my lecturers and asked him if any of the students in the media class would be interested in participating in a discussion about online communications on an upcoming Thursday in London. Jonathan presented this in class one week and asked if anyone would be interested, four of us quickly raised our hands.

A gentleman from a market research firm contacted the four of us and indicated that we would be participating in a chat with some others about what kinds of things we do online in our daily lives. We anticipated this to mean that there would be about 10 of us in total, with one mediator and one representative from the Economist present. We all indicated that we were still interested, and were supposed to show up in London on the 8th.

This morning one classmate decided he couldn’t spare the day, so the other three of us, Matt, Vaniah, and I, boarded the train to London. We arrived a bit early and had a wander around Green Park and by the Palace before heading over to the Economist headquarters.

When we arrived at the building, we were met by the mediator, as well as one director from the Economist. We also met two other people who would be participating, just two – for a total of five of us! We proceeded up to the 14th floor of the building, which had amazing views of the entire city. We were grabbed lunch from a lovely buffet and proceeded into a corner room where we ate and had a quick chat. The moderator then told us that we would be moving from this room into the board room for our discussion. He also mentioned that the board was going to be in there as well as us!!

We moved to the other room and sat at one end of the board table, and then walked in the entire board of the Economist; about a dozen of them. Most of them sat at the table as well, but others had to stand as we were sitting in their seats! We were instructed to ignore them for the first hour of discussion, when we talked about all of the things we did online, the hardware we used, the websites we frequent, how we communicate with people, what website we trust the content of and why, things of that nature. For the last half hour, they let the board ask us questions as well. It was interesting to see just how more automated, connected, and reliant we MBAs were than everyone else in the room. I think they were a little surprised by just how much time we spend on line. We even refer to it as ‘being in the matrix’ – and it’s amazing how much withdrawal you can feel with no access!

At the end of the chat we shook hands with some of the directors, they thanked us for our time and as a thank you gave each of us a 1 year subscription to economist.com. We walked out of the building, looked at each other, and wondered if that all had really happened. Not every day you get to have lunch with the board of directors of the Economist – though we kicked ourselves for not thinking of asking for a photo with them for our blogs… I think they would have been amused. ;)