It was the Summer Program. Single Serving Size.

Four hundred K-School alums gathered in the ARCO Forum on a June weekend to bond, learn, and share their experiences on the job and in the world. The 2002 Alumni Refresher brought back the spirit of camaraderie and self-growth that alums associate with our time in Cambridge.

The event had all the pleasures of KSGers’ early experiences, with none of the “they really let ME in?” anxiety. Brian Mandell is still the planet’s funniest non-smiling human. Ron Heifetz MPA 1983 is still what baseball broadcasters say about pitchers, “sneaky fast.” The start of his talks don’t look and feel as if they’re going to be so tinged with the profound, yet
they always are. In that way the weekend was so much like the actual graduate program: the faculty was just as amazing, and as before, the students were quietly the real stars. There was plenty of time to chatter and catch up, and in the catching up, just as in the full programs, an untold amount of learning occurred.

Jeanette Balotin MPA 1989 said the refresher was a valuable experience and a terrific opportunity to network with some talented colleagues. “The lectures and topics were quite interesting, and I also had an opportunity to become reacquainted with several of my classmates from the MPA Program in 1989,” she said. “Overall, it was a very dynamic meeting.”

Alumni Programs Director Betsy Myers MPA 2000 agrees, saying that the refresher is important to the mission of her office. “Our objective is to reconnect our alumni back to the school and to each other.”

Mandell is now looking at what motivates people to waste so much time in meetings. (A major part of the line of questioning: What are the payoffs for participating in nonproductive meetings?) He shared some insights in “Becoming an Effective Negotiator,” which featured a multi-round negotiation exercise with a fictional human life at stake — though the same exercise is carried out for real in hospitals every day. The Mandell session typified the 13 workshops that ran throughout the weekend, with subjects from “Nonprofit Innovation: Strategies to Grow” to “Running to Win: Lessons from the Campaign Trail.”

Interspersed with the breakout periods were plenary sessions such as the one conducted by Heifetz and Marty Linksy IOP 1973, who generously shared the message of their book Leadership Without Easy Answers. Leadership is most often about requesting that people lose something, and people don’t like to lose. The consequence of that tension is the challenge of leadership. The authors shared their learning about how to survive, and grow, after accepting that challenge. On Saturday, former White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart and Ted Bogosian MPP 1979, producer of a documentary about Lockhart’s work during his White House years, offered a glimpse at professional life in the real West Wing.

Just as during the full program, the big problem for participants was deciding which offering to participate in; the Cambridge night scene after dinner was, um, unstructured; and at the refresher’s end, participants wished it could continue. Which it will, in a sense: the 2003 event begins on June 12.

Journalist Craig Sandler owns the State House News Service in Boston.

Photo: Martha Stewart