New York and the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize

This past Friday, I attended the Social Enterprise conference at Columbia along with roughly two dozen classmates from Yale SOM. We heard from entrepreneurs building mobile platforms and low cost health products, leaders in impact investing, venture capitalists, and others. But the highlight was hearing from Leymah Gbowee, a leader from Liberia who had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize earlier Friday morning. Forgive me if I sound like I'm bragging, but it was pretty cool. The conference had scheduled Ms. Gbowee some time ago to speak about her experiences as a leader of the nonviolent movement to stop the Second Liberian Civil War. She told amazing stories and talked about leadership, risk, fear, and hope. It was incredibly inspiring. Being just a train ride away from New York makes conferences like this one a relatively easy undertaking. And the incredibly lucky timing of getting to hear from a leader such as Ms. Gbowee made the day a very memorable one.