A Story of Unity

July 31, 2012

In February, two Darden teams traveled to the University of Colorado in Boulder for the finals of a Net Impact case competition on hydraulic fracking. Delirious from a near all-nighter of presentation prep, my team, Bennett Graham, Jonathan Harris, Michael Barnett and I, invented a team handshake in the final moments before delivering out presentations to the judges. We coined it the "collaborative handshake," and we have been waiting for Power Point Clip Art to contact us for the copyright contract ever since.

Microsoft still hasn't called, but the collaborative handshake has already crossed an ocean to a new continent. During Think Impact University in June in Kigali, our scholar team from Nyarubuye adopted the handshake as part of our team mantra. When we made it to the villages, our translators renamed it "Unity," but the story does not end here.

A few weeks later, I met up with a scholar from the next community overof Nkomomangwa. James said, "You have to see this cool Rwandan thing our translator taught us called Unity." I had to tell him that that was in fact a symbol of American origin, but I was secretly so excited that the collaborative handshake was spreading.

My design team has also adopted the handshake, and we start and end every meeting with Unity. The team was a little leery in our first meeting, but now they remind me if I forget it. It seems silly and inconsequential, but there is something wonderful about the laughter and team spirit that come along with sharing something together. I'm pretty sure that Microsoftwill agree as soon as they find it!