IU student Jordan Young and Head Football Coach Curt Cignetti with the signed ball he gifted her and her Negotiations class team. Courtesy photo
Last week in Bloomington, a Negotiations class at the Indiana Kelley School of Business was in the limelight for an experiment that went beyond what anyone imagined.
Kate Christensen, assistant professor of marketing, had given her students an assignment with a simple choice. In small teams of three to seven, students chose to take either the certainty of a $5 bill, or to reach blindly into a bag full of IU‑branded mystery items like decals, cowbells, koozies, and other odds and ends.
They could trade, sell, offer services, or invent something new. The only rule was to see how far creativity – and a good story – could take them.
THE BEGINNING OF YOUNG’S TRADE
Among the students was Jordan Young, a marketing senior. She and her team opted for the IU-branded item – which ended up being a 3-inch foam “No. 1” finger.
Young figured she’d try posting the assignment and the foam finger on Reddit, just to see if it might gain any attention and some potential trades. What she didn’t expect was that within a few hours, her Reddit thread had gained a ton of attention.
Jordan Young’s teams’ prize: a miniature foam “No. 1” finger. Courtesy photo
“I remember when our group first pulled a foam finger and posted it on social media,” Young says. They didn’t expect much, but by the end of the day, their Reddit post had 8,000 views.
“There were people that reached out to me that didn’t even necessarily want to trade. They just wanted to contribute and help our group skip a couple of steps,” Young says. One person gave them antique twin headboards. Another offered a trombone, which Young learned to play. The final trade that ended the assignment was a vintage wedding dress.
MEETING COACH CIGNETTI
All the while, aside from the trades, Young and her group was still receiving contributions from the community.
Young reached out to the associate dean of the Media School, who posted about the project on Twitter. She also emailed the infamous former IU grad Mark Cuban who gave her his advice. She kept IU football coach Curt Cignetti updated on her trades, even though he didn’t wish to trade any of the items. He did however, want to give her and her group something.
“People just loved the story and wanted to be a part of it,” Young says. Even after the assignment ended, strangers approached her on campus saying they’d followed the saga online.
The most serendipitous moment came when Young went to pick up items from Cignetti’s office. She wasn’t supposed to meet him—just grab the items from staff that he had left for her. But in the parking lot, she ran into the coach himself. He then went to the office with her, and handed her what he had set aside, which was a poster and a football that he had signed. Even more unbelievable, Jordan posed with him for a photo – and he was smiling.
“That was the most exciting part of the project,” she says.
THE VALUE OF THE IU NETWORK
Within this assignment was a powerful lesson in value creation.
A few given/traded items, including the vintage wedding dress. Courtesy photo
Christensen, who spent years in the entertainment industry before joining academia, designed the assignment thinking it would be an engaging way to teach her students about value and the power of their network.
“I was looking to give them an assignment that would be engaging, which is not the easiest thing to do in the age of AI,” she says. Christensen also wanted to tap into the momentum of IU’s killer football season.
Her deeper goal, though, was to teach them about the power of storytelling. “Starting with money can seem certain and solid, but starting with a story, there’s more opportunity,” Christensen says. “You have to find your market, and I was hoping they’d see it was massive. We have the biggest alumni network in the world.”
Christensen says her students all took wildly different paths. Some traded for rally towels, doughnuts, a Pokémon card, a LEGO car, and Fernando Mendoza’s jersey.
One group used their trades to buy a winter hat and jacket for an unhoused man living in a tent off of a street near campus. Students negotiated with freshmen, bartenders, roommates, Target shoppers, and retail workers. “A lot of the things they did surprised me,” Christensen says. “It was fun to see the difference in what they thought would work for them versus what actually worked.”
LESSONS FOR A LIFETIME
Young learned quite a few valuable lessons from this assignment, and she believes more business schools should offer courses that push students out of there comfort zones like this one did.
Advice for Jordan Young from Mark Cuban. Courtesy photo
“I think a lot of business students think that value is just monetary, but a lot of business isn’t just that,” she says. “It’s a lot of relationship management and building connections with people. That might be one of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned in four years.”
She also discovered the power of initiative. “You really can’t lose much from reaching out. You might only regret not going out and just trying.” Meeting strangers from the internet, having twenty‑minute conversations about their items, and sharing her story pushed her far beyond her usual comfort zone.
Christensen says that watching students go out there and exceed her expectations like Young has was the highlight of her semester.
“Students may get these opportunities in life, and sometimes they don’t see the value,” she says. “What made me really happy was to see Jordan going all in and beyond. Who would have thought that she’d be talking to Mark Cuban, and he’d be telling us about the value of storytelling?” And then there was Cignetti, who ‘never smiled before,’ and we all got to see him smiling! I really got a lot of joy out of this assignment,” she says.
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