Lester Thurow MIT Sloan Senior Executives program (1988)

Tom's transformative encounter at the MIT Sloan Senior Executives program — the source of his sound-bite-driven teaching style. Used here to motivate the student-presentation assignment in §1–§2.

I haven't told you about Lester Thurow, have I? In 1988, Lester Thurow taught me to completely revise the way I made presentations at conferences, and it has also influenced the way I teach. I've always known that you can only get two or three ideas across in an hour, and that was a revelation for me in my junior year at MIT. I was taking a course I didn't have to take. I was a materials scientist, and there was a course called 8.211 in the Physics Department, Introduction to Quantum Mechanics. Well, if you're going to understand how a semiconductor works you need to know something about quantum mechanics, so I thought, okay, I'll take this course.