For the prospective MBAers readers: Every student that you ask will tell you more or less the same about their school, “our community is great, people are amazing, collaborative environment, etc…”.

Sometimes it is very difficult to tell appart the shark-culture schools from the others. And students telling you that “the community is great” are telling you the truth, most top schools have a great culture and that person loves being at school. One of my frustrations while shopping around B-schools was how difficult it was to get specific examples or data.
So for your convenience, I will provide a datapoint. I want to share with you a simple example of the community at London Business School. A short history that fills me with happiness:

I have the bad habit of removing my wrist-watch while typing. Last week, I successfully forgot my watch at some PC. Alone I left him, lying by an unkown cold keyboard.

Of course I did not realize until a couple of hours later. Or maybe a day (there are watches everywhere nowadays), because it is not the first time that I leave the appartment without the watch. Assuming I left it at home, I did not care until last WE, when I was unable to locate it at home.

I panicked, it is a very special watch, not only a beautiful gift from a very important person, but a thin titanium designer beautiful watch (pic on the right!). After a big deal of frustration, I assumed the unavoidable: Too bad, no idea where I left it, someone has found it and made it theirs, I will never ever see it again, no idea where I might have forgotten it.

Long story short, I thought that maybe I had lost it at London Business School. And yes! Lucky me! Some caritative soul picked up the lost watch, gave it to campus security and (once I described it properly) security gave it back to me!

Isn’t life wonderful? People are really nice around here!

Of course this might happen in many other places, and maybe some other people might have chosen to keep it… yet it happened