THE OPM NETWORK IS A PRIVATE COMMUNITY OF HBS OPM GRADUATES
Keep up the connection, deepen the learning, and contribute your wisdom to make this community strong.
- We love learning: Even though we are all extremely busy, we make space for our own growth and the OPM Network makes this easier.
- We need each other: We have a great deal to offer each other, OPM Network maintains our deep ties. OPM Network helps connect diverse leaders with shared interests.
- We are global: OPM Network helps connect diverse leaders with shared interests, and we make it easy for you to stay close even though you may be physically far away.
- We lead: OPM Network helps us continue to evolve and stay current in our ever-changing world or global community.
Continue to leverage the unique OPM experience. Alumni Forums give you a structured, organized community that revisits vital OPM themes and content, while also making space for your urgent and important challenges and opportunities.
What is an OPM Alumni Forum?
Most leaders find Forum to be one of the most valuable things they can do with their time. Diverse peers meet monthly in a confidential space to work on their biggest challenges. They form strong bonds that help each other outside the Forum session, by sharing networks, ideas, and support. The process itself teaches leadership lessons about vulnerability, powerful questions, storytelling, and many other skills.
Our community and sessions are based on Forum practices championed by peer learning leaders like YPO:
DO I HAVE TIME FOR THIS?
This is a firm commitment, like a Board of Directors meeting. Each member’s consistent voice is crucial to creating a powerful session. Meetings should not be attended on the go; you’ll need to arrange your calendar to be in a quiet place with strong internet for these two hours.
There is almost no work outside the Forum. And inside, you are working on your most pressing challenges. Participants say that they can’t afford not to make this time.
Nuts & Bolts
- Forums are curated and launched periodically from the pool of graduating OPM participants or CEO’s.
- Forums will commit to each other for 1 year, meeting monthly for 2 hours.
- One meeting will be an in-person retreat, at a location and date agreed upon by the Forum.
- Travel is not necessary except for retreat, but you will need quiet & good internet.
- All sessions are professionally facilitated.
- Staff will be available 24x7 to support logistics and any questions.
- Professional facilitators will structure, guide and follow-up sessions.
- Dues for this program will be $3,000/year, due when Forum invitation accepted, fully refundable after the first session. This includes professional facilitation for the retreat. Travel and expenses are not included.
- At the request of the Forum, the OPM Network may seek out and recruit additional OPM’rs to keep the group at about 6-9 members.
TIMELINE
September - October
🔘 Collect Candidates
🔘 Q&A with Circles team member
🔘 Start recruiting new members
November
🔘 Finalize new members
🔘 Invites & Confirmations
🔘 Schedule virtual warm-up session
January
🔘 In-person retreat to kick off year
Go!
Monthly meetings
About OPM Network
The OPM Network supports the continuation of your OPM learning beyond graduation to foster our community. For years, class chairs and secretaries have generously worked in silo’s to keep their cohorts engaged, run webinars, plan reunions and facilitate conversations. They have independently coordinated with the school. Alumni have missed out on many chances for cross-cohort collaboration. We are building the OPM Network to support the almost 10,000 strong global OPM graduates and make it easier to continue the journey together.
About Circles
Circles Learning Labs has partnered with HBS and other peer learning leaders like Young President’s Organization and The Aspen Institute to build technology and services that make it easy to scale a consistently great Forum experience virtually. We are a small but mighty global team, obsessed with the power of great small-group dynamics. We deliver experiences for communities and companies using our proprietary CircleSpace technology. We’ve been an OPM partner since 2018.
FAQ's
The OPM Network supports the continuation of your OPM learning beyond graduation to foster our community. For years, class chairs and secretaries have generously worked in silo’s to keep their cohorts engaged, run webinars, plan reunions and faciliate conversations. They have independently coordinated with the school. Alumni have missed out on many chances for cross-cohort collaboration. We are building the OPM Network to support the almost 10,000 strong global OPM graduates and make it easier to continue the journey together. OPM Forum demonstrates one of the most powerful ways to get value from this community.
The OPM administration and Alumni office are supportive of the OPM Network as an independent organization. They are not funding it or governing it, but we are closely coordinating. As the Network grows, it will benefit the school by helping organize this alumni community and offer the ability to coordinate touch points and requests for resources. For example, from time to time faculty attend webinars and reunions – having a single network will help rationalize these requests.
The OPM Network is run by OPM’rs with the help of Circles Learning Labs, Inc. It is not a formal school program or fundraising avenue.
For many of us, the relationship with our Forum mates transcends the words “friend,” “colleague” and “advisor.” You will gain a circle of others who are deeply invested in their success. You will have a committed space in your busy calendar for reflection on your biggest leadership challenges. You will also experience the powerful leadership lessons members all have, around vulnerability, inclusion, presence, listening, blind spots, storytelling, diverse perspectives learning itself — you will gain leaders around you who get this and become allies reinforces those things in your own workplace.
We recommend looking at this this as a Board Meeting. Because it is virtual, certain special norms, like being in a quiet stationary place with good internet, need to be practiced. Most Forums use a guildeline of two misses in a year, after which there’s a dicussion. At the end of the day, each Forum will determine its own norms.
We’ll start with the standard of “Noone, Nothing, Never.” During the initial training meetings, Forums will spend time grappling with what this really means. We’re designing the first year as a gradual learning experience, where norms like this will be consistently revisited, with member’s understanding and skill deepening over time.
Maybe. We are planning for a certain level of churn, and do have a process to add members to a Forum when this happens.
Our target is 6-8. We’ll likely begin with 8 members and anticipate possible drop-off.
Circles Learning Labs partners r peer learning leaders like Harvard Business School and Young President’s Organizations and The Aspen Institute to build technology that makes it easy to scale a consistently great Forum experience virtually. The video space itself has features that make running a great Forum easy. Years of hardening has made the space reliable. But the entire digital environment makes the launching and managing of Forums at scale efficient. Participants will have almost no learning curve; you’ll simply join your session and instantly learn the few features that matter for Forum. There will be live and instant 24×7 support, just in case.
There’s nothing quite as powerful as a Forum retreat, and we will offer that option for interested Forums. This year, we are starting with a 1 – 1.5 day experience at the beginning of the year,l. This will also serve to onboard new members. Forums that make this commitment will reach a new level of connection, depth and help to each other.
Circles Learning Labs, Inc (Circles) is an independent company on a mission to grow learning communities across the world. Circles has worked with the OPM program for three years to test, build and deliver the Virtual Living Group component of the OPM program. They are supporting the technology and management of the OPM Network for free, and will pay for this by offering premium small group experiences to members and being available to support their efforts to build community within their companies. More information here.