Cornell Day 3: The Womb of Civilization

by Devin Selte

You’re probably scratching your head trying to figure out what the title of this blog has to do with credit unions and Day 3 of the CUES CEO Institute II at Cornell.

Well, it does a lot.

Our main focus for the day was on Leading with Power and is summed up best with this quote:

Driving changes in strategy, structure, and culture will, in part, rest on your ability to build power & influence, network & ability…

Our closing exercise called “The Kidney Case” allowed us to spend a lot of time practicing the area of influence and power. As part of our pre-reading, we were provided with 9 candidates who were vying for a kidney transplant and it was our challenge to rank them in order from 1 to 9 on who would get the kidney. After much discussion in areas of building influence, perception, mindset, body language, and power posing throughout the day, we were split into teams and assigned 1 of the 9 candidates. In 30 minutes, we were to develop a presentation to convince our fellow classmates (acting as the Transplant Review Board) to select our candidate as the recipient of the available kidney.

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