NHH CEMS

Block Seminar on Life Design

Voss, Norway | August 19-23, 2024

Overview

Most top business schools do a good job at preparing you to solve all kinds of analytical and technical problems. You’ll enter the workforce having mastered various cutting-edge theories, frameworks, and tools, which will empower you to succeed professionally. And while this advanced technical training is desirable and indeed in many cases invaluable for career success, it falls woefully short at preparing you for the things in life that are most likely the most important.

Mission

The mission of this course is to enable you to contemplate, design, and execute on a life of well-being, flourishing, and meaning — what the ancient Greeks called “eudaimonia.” By doing so, you’ll begin to address the kinds of ambiguous and amorphous questions, which are critical when aiming to live the good life.

Questions

During the NHH CEMS Block Seminar on Life Design, you’ll explore deeply personal, eudaimonic questions such as:

  • What are my core values and where do they come from?

  • Where do I find meaning and how might I nurture it?

  • What is my life’s purpose and how do I craft a life around it?

  • How might I nurture greater focus and attention to be more present when it matters the most?

  • How do external influences such as parental expectations, peer pressure, and prestige impact my career choices, and should it?

  • How do we define happiness, what are its sources according to science, and how do we experience more of it?

  • How does stress usually present itself for me and how can I better manage it?

  • What is self-transcendence, why does it matter, and how can I achieve it?

  • How do I want to be remembered by those closest to me once I’m gone?

  • How might I wisely balance family, career, health, faith, and friends?

  • What are my key blindspots when I’m not at my best and how can I build greater self-awareness?

  • What am I profoundly grateful for, how can I develop daily gratitude, and why?

  • How might I embrace renewal to become a lifelong learner?

  • How might I find tranquility and wisdom through reflection, contemplation, and access to nature?

  • How might I stop being so tough on myself and develop greater self-compassion?

  • What is love, what does neuroscience have to say about it, and what role does it play in my life?

Nurture Deep Self-Awareness

Develop Your Relationship with Others

Craft a Career with Purpose

Structure

The NHH CEMS Block Seminar takes place in a highly engaging and immersive learning setting during a week of deep bonding, reflection, sharing, physical activity, and fun. We will gather for our workshops from Monday to Friday, 9:00 to 16:00. All our meals will take place as a group, and we will work and play for extended periods of time with plenty of rest-and-relaxation breaks in between.

Subjects

Together, we’ll take a deep dive into the following cross-disciplinary subjects:

  • Social, behavioral, and contemplative neuroscience

  • Positive, humanistic, and existential psychology

  • Stoicism, Greek philosophy, Buddhism, and Taoism

  • Design thinking, creativity, and innovation

Themes

The seminar is divided into five sections with the following themes:

1.    Discovering

  • Human Connection

  • Mindfulness

  • Self-Awareness

  • Strengths & Weaknesses

  • Authenticity

2.    Embodying

  • Reacting vs. Responding

  • Presence

  • Gratitude

 

3.    Defining

  • Values

  • Biases & External Pressures

  • Dying Before You Die

  • Meaning

  • Purpose

 

4.    Designing

  • Squiggly Career

  • AI & the Workplace

  • Balance & Ikigai

  • Personal Manifesto

 

5.    Doing

  • Rapid Prototyping & Testing

  • Resilience & Learning from Failure

  • WuWei

  • Self-Compassion

  • Renewal

Environment

You can expect to learn side-by-side with likeminded yet highly diverse CEMS students under an intimate environment of deep psychological safety, trust, and caring.

You’ll leave perfectionism and grade-anxiety at the door since this course is about taking ambitious personal risks and growing through play, foolishness, and failure. Traditional concerns for binary and right-or-wrong thinking go out the window. Instead, you’ll dance with, and learn to thrive in, the ambiguity of life’s wonderful gray areas.

In other words, you won’t take yourself too seriously yet will take your learning very seriously.

You’ll practice deep reflection and develop your self-awareness through a series of science-backed approaches including visualization, mindfulness, journaling, and dyads. You’ll also learn to ideate, prototype, and test your ideal life using Stanford-style design thinking. The mindsets and methods you’ll learn here will serve you well throughout your life as you continuously iterate on your ever-evolving purpose.

Pedagogy

Probably most importantly, you’ll establish long-life friendships with your classmates that will serve as reliable sources of meaning, collaboration, and partnership.

Community

Suggested Reading

If you’d like to indulge in some non-compulsory summer reading, I suggest the following masterpiece:

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

Prerequisites

The prerequisites for this course include your willingness to:

  • retain an open mind

  • question preconceived notions

  • challenge biases and judgments

  • dance with ambiguity

  • explore uncharted areas about yourself

  • connect authentically with others

  • play and not take yourself too seriously

  • design a life of service that is truly worth living, and

  • above all else, enjoy your limited time on this Earth

About Fede

Fede Lozano is the father of a multicultural seven-year-old girl and husband to a proud Bergen native. His wife and child have beautiful, angelic voices. He does not. When not with family, Fede loves to interact with, learn from, and facilitate teams of students — and to suffer while climbing up ridiculously steep hills on his gravel bike.

He teaches business whiz kids at the Norwegian School of Economics, proud engineering geeks at the Norwegian University of Science & Technology, and brainy medical students at the University of Bergen School of Medicine.

Fede currently leads Pracademy, one of Norway’s top innovation-training firms, which works with organizations like Stanford, Samsung, LG, Telenor, DNB, Wilhelmsen, Skatteetaten, and NRK. He also recently founded Die Before You Die, a nonprofit that enables people to design lives of meaning. 

Fede earned his MBA at Stanford University Graduate School of Business where he was awarded the Social Innovation Fellowship. Stanford invested a big chunk of money in one of his startups, which soon failed spectacularly. Fede’s ego took a blow as a result, and he became a tiny bit better human. 

He likes to invest in his students’ startups, is addicted to outrageously spicy food, and on May 6th, 2021, he died four times (not from the spicy food).