With our Entrepreneurship course in full swing, and keeping my interest, I thought I'd post another interesting article from one of my new favorite Entrepreneur/VC blogs - "Both Sides of the Table".
I'm not going to get into the argument of whether or not people with MBAs are good fits or not, since that's a generalization and not relevant. People can decide from their experiences if the degree is useful or not. But there were a few points that I found interesting &/or thoughtful:
Curriculum - I would tend to agree that you could learn as much from reading topical books (or internet research) as you do from the topics taught in the classroom. One of the things that I find incredibly valuable in our Executive MBA program is the breadth of experience that I'm able to derive from our classroom discussions and outside discussions. The professors that are valuable to me have been the ones that provided a conceptual framework, but the primary focus of their courses have been the application to our personal experiences or current/future roles.
Colleagues - This is far and away the most valuable interaction from an MBA program, but I believe that if often gets under-estimated if the culture/sub-culture within the program is overly focused on grades/rankings. I've told people many times that I'll be happy if I recall 50% of the coursework concepts in 5yrs, but I'll be extremely disappointed if my work/personal network doesn't include at least 75% of the people from my program in 5-10yrs.
Sales - I completely agree that sales/influencing is a subject that is lacking in most MBA programs. I'm sure it gets neglected (or completely left out) because it's not considered a science or area worthy of academic research, but it is the lifeblood of every company. Not only that, internal selling of new ideas (innovation, change management, etc.) hinges on the ability of leaders to sell. Maybe it needs to be added as an elective. The occasional classroom presentation just doesn't equate to sales.
Recently, there's been a spike in new educational "institutions". Ranging from University of the People to Seth Godin's SAMBA to Jack Welch's Management Institute to Richard Branson's School of Entrepreneurship. Are these fads, since the publishing industry is going under and folks like Welch and Godin need new outlets for their work, or is this another nail in the coffin of the traditional MBA? With BusinessWeek for sale, and potentially no longer existing, will the BusinessWeek rankings for MBA programs continue to be relevant, or will this get picked up by a blog?
Just like every other large institute that was prominent during the 20th century, traditional universities are now having to adopt to greater global competition and distributed/democratized competition. How they adapt to this new environment is a chapter that will be written over the next 5-10 years.
Let me preface this by saying that some (or much) of this may not make sense to many people reading it. I have a strange way of processing information. I'm sure there is a psychological name for it, but I've never found it. It essentially goes like this.
Read a lot, almost anything you can get your hands on, in all formats (newspapers, blogs, magazines, books, etc.). Sometimes read the entire piece, and sometimes scan it.
Listen a lot, to people from many of different backgrounds and social levels.
Ask questions that sound broad, but are typically only looking for a partial answer.
Do not consciously coordinate the things you read or hear or ask.
Periodically have a whole bunch of facts, ideas, concepts, quotes and other relevant pieces come together into ideas or pictures. Scratch your head wondering how they all came together.
This piecing together sometimes happens on purpose, like when it's time to finish a paper or analysis. And sometimes it just "clicks" in the middle of a sentence as I'm talking to someone. The latter are the ones that I can never quite figure out, but occasionally I let it flow and it sounds like a reasonably intelligent set of thoughts (note: that's not bragging...I honestly don't know how it pieces together).
So what's the point? So what? Hang on a second, I'm getting there.
As I mentioned before, I read quite bit. Since I pay my mortgage by doing things that are semi-business related, I often read books on business. I'm currently reading Made to Stick, Innovation that Fits, and Free. I'm also reading Serve the People and The Blue Sweater, not so much for their business content but rather as a way to gain some inside into foreign culture to help augment this semester. Each one of those books is sitting on my nightstand, and each one is somewhere between 10% and 60% finished. I rarely seem to finish the books, but I always find a few interesting snippets from one that relates to one of the others. It's my favorite part of reading these various types of books, when one snippet connects to another and seems to create something new. A new idea, or a bigger concept.
As we've moved farther into our MBA program, we're now at that stage when more and more snippets from various courses or experiences are piecing themselves together in my head. The broader concepts these create are becoming interesting, useful and fostering a bunch of ideas for new businesses.
I'm not sure if this is the case for many (or any) of my classmates, as I often get blank stares when I try and explain some of these conjoined snippets. I'm not sure if they don't see things the same way, or if I still needed to work on explaining the new concepts, or if I'm just off base. Many of them are incredibly knowledgeable about specific topics, so it's quite possible that it could be the latter.
Either way, more and more pieces are starting to connect with each other or are at least in each other's gravitational field. For me, this is when fun stuff happens. Now the challenge becomes not over-thinking things.
Thank you, Seth. I couldn't agree more!! And this isn't strictly a Marketing course problem, it's an issue for 99% of the courses. I have a pile of books that I lug around each semester, and they will eventually take up space in my home office, and I can't remember one moment over the past 12 months when I was class I had a textbook instead of an electronic copy of something. Not once!!
[UPDATE - In all fairness, I need to note that Dr.Iacovou did conduct our ITMgm't course in an all electronic format. This approach seemed to be well received by at least 75-80% of the class, so consider that a step in the right direction.]
[More details about these concepts can be found here]
This is about a 70min video from Umair Hague, called Conflict of Crisis. I'd highly recommend it to all my classmates. It goes against the majority of what we learn in MBA programs, because they typically teach based on examples (cases, companies, etc.) that succeeded over the past 5-20yrs.
Haque's messages are starting to connect with me more and more for a few reasons:
In OpsMgmt, we're reading case after case about how manufacturing jobs and companies are leaving the US because of lower costs. But while the US grew to economic dominance on the backs of these manufacturing giants, we're not necessarily seeing similar prosperity happening in the 3rd-world countries that are taking over this work. Why is this not happening?
The GenY population is not embracing large company ideals and culture, they are bringing their principles to companies and asking why they aren't being embraced.
The "value" created over the last 10yrs is almost completely unsustainable (as we've seen with the last two bubbles; Internet & Credit).
So what does all of this mean? It means the pace of change could potentially start moving much faster than any principles we're learning in B-School today. It means businesses could be in sprint mode all the time, with radical market shifts happening every 5 years. It means you need to keep you mind open to new ideas, and consider looking for ways to focus on the 4 principles Haque mentions. While the examples he gives are still somewhat limited, they are beginning to show the building blocks of what could be the new 21st century economic principles.
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Here are the four pillars of smart growth - for economies, communities, and corporations:
This past week, I watched a video from the new Dean of the WFU Business schools, Steve Reinemund. It covered a number of topics:
The current economy and its effects on WFU and the business schools (undergrad and graduate)
The merging of the undergrad and graduate programs and the vision to improve the school's offerings and ranking.
Steps the school is taking to ensure that near-term graduating students will receive additional assistance in finding employment.
One area that interested me quite a bit were his comments about creating new business school models that leveraged the breadth of education that WFU offered, both from the liberal arts of the undergrad departments and the joint activities of the business schools. The main idea being that we need to do a better job of bringing together excellent ideas and people, regardless of their field of discipline. It makes alot of sense to me, considering that very few companies compete in markets which are only taught in B-Schools (maybe banking or consulting?).
Over the weekend, I went to a number of social events and the topic of the economy came up with several friends. We made the obligatory guesses at how long the downturn will last and how severe it will ultimately be. In most cases, we determined that many of the jobs being lost will probably not come back, at least not for large corporations. They will find that productivity has outpaced the cost of the employees, or that buying habits will be changed for many years to come because of this recession.
These two things got me thinking. Why doesn't the school create a "2 Guys (or Gals) and the Internet" program to drive entrepreneurship? It could start as an extension to Dr.Mandel's Center for Entrepreneurship, or it could be much smaller and focused, like Mark Cuban's Open Source Stimulus program. And don't limit it to just the Business school. Begin to leverage the goal to tie in the entire set of skills and thoughts of Wake Forest. Or be really bold, and start expanding the program to include other schools from the ACC, maybe leveraging those that have skills that aren't world-class at Wake Forest. Lots of smart engineers at Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech and NC State. Amazing things happen when you allow yourself to branch out with small ideas.
So where does the "and the Internet" part come into this thinking? Am I requiring that these new ventures be only focused on Internet technology? No way!! I'm suggesting that since there are so many opportunities these days to leverage the interconnectedness of the Internet to source aspects of a business, that this should be a mandate of the program. These "2 person" operations will need to use all the leverage they can to compete, and that's completely possible with today's Internet. Need business cards - link up with Moo. Need to host your business operations - link with Amazon. Need early market research or advertising buzz - link up with Twitter. These are just basic items, but the ability to pay-as-you-need and grow without all the fixed costs (or people) is there for the right idea and motivation.
One of the knocks on MBA graduates is that they tend to only focus on numbers. Spreadsheets, statistical models, market segmentations, etc..
But as I read and watch this latest econalypse unfold, I'm starting to wonder if people have become numb to the magnitude of the numbers being thrown around. For example - up until recently, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett had net worth of approximately $40,000,000,000. (NOTE - I wrote the full number out to show the magnitude, because it's too easy to forget how big $40B really is.). This number represents 30-40 years of work from these men, creating businesses that produce products or services to the world on a massive scale.
We used to talk about how Gates or Buffet could take all their money and solve some serious world challenges, exactly how the Gates Foundation is doing today. $40B was a lot of money.
$40B is also 5% of the funds allocated to TARP. And many experts are saying that the depth of the banking crisis might be 2-4x the existing known level, so TARP II or TARP III might actually make that $40B be 1% or .1% or .01%.
Sometimes it's helpful to put numbers in perspective for people, especially when the numbers are HUGE. At my previous company, we shipped a product that was supposed to help scale the performance of the Internet. The examples we used to communicate it's performance were things like "download the entire Library of Congress in less than 1 second" or "allow every person in NYC to watch a YouTube video at the same time". While these examples were still huge in scale, they were much better at communicating the scope than saying 180 TerraBytes per Second.
So my tip to anyone trying to communicate the scope of the numbers being thrown around today is to try and put them into perspective. I find that if people can relate to the numbers on some level, it helps them find a way to engage in the ramifications of those numbers.
If all goes well, in just 11 months they will give me a a really expensive piece of paper with fancy writing on it and the WFU logo, which will allow me to add "MBA" to my resume. And hopefully along the way I will have gained a good bit of knowledge on topics such as these and these, and a few others from May to December.
Two courses that aren't on the course-list but it feels like we're getting PhD level exposure are corporate layoffs and corporate leadership. I'll start with the later.
I don't usually write about my company on this blog, but thought it might be appropriate for a couple reasons:
Leadership seems to be in short supply these days, and our Vice-Chairman is truly an outstanding motivation speaker about leadership topics.
Education is so important to our Vice Chairman that he endowed the Business School at his alma mater.
This talk was given as part of a leadership series at the graduate school at NC State, so it's speaking to students. (NOTE - It's about 65 mins long, but worth a watch)
This talk does a really nice job of highlighting why attitude and motivation are so important, especially during difficult times. He provides some excellent examples of how the company dealt with the Internet Bubble, as well as how they realized changes in the world and took actions to reposition the company to better compete in the new realities of the world. Finally, he talks about how he uses frequent goal setting and open discussion to build and maintain culture and focus through good times and bad times.
One the flip side, I'm also getting a PhD in watching how companies, their leaders and their employees deal with layoffs on a massive scale. This isn't Organization Behavior, this is Laying Off People 101. I have two Senior Executives on my team who are dealing with layoffs of nearly 20%. I have one classmate that luckily was on the right side of a 33% cutback, and another that is going through a major merger and restructuring. And this is just my team. The stories are fairly consistent from the rest of my classmates and their teams.
While I don't get any credit for these two additional topics, they are definitely adding to my list of experiences and will hopefully be valuable at some time in the future.
Dr. Beatty forwarded this to us today. More than anyone else I've met in the program, Dr.Beatty is focused on trying to get across the point that regardless of any concepts that come up in class (theory, rules, etc.), none of it is useful unless you can truly understand it and apply it to the real world. He was definitely trying to send a message to the students with this, I believe for all the right reasons.
To be completely honest, after reading a few of the posts on that page, it made me consider no longer telling friends and colleagues that I was pursuing my MBA. Were those people serious? Just because they have an expensive piece of paper hanging on their wall, they somehow think all the things they learned about competitiveness, strategy, differentiation, etc.. are not relevant to them? Just because they did something yesterday means they are entitled to something today, or tomorrow? Considering all the MBAs working on Wall Street, maybe that explains some of the reasons we're in the economic mess we're in..??
I'm afraid that this MBA culture is pervasive at many schools, and with many students. And its not just graduates, but unfortunately it's also prospective MBAs.
One of the things I really like about an executive MBA program is that most of the students are at an age where they have been through a few bumps, and they have learned the value of doing, and taking actions. For the most part, they are in this program because they realize they have some deficiencies and are hoping to find new areas to grow and learn. I've spoken about it before, but this just seems like another example of setting goals needs to be about something bigger than yourself and needs to look farther ahead than your next trip to Starbucks.
Sitting a lunch with some classmates this weekend, the conversation revolved to job-hunting, resumes, networking and other things that become top of mind when you read about the economy and layoffs on a daily basis. The conversation then turned to what value you get from an MBA, especially in terms of it's brand, it's rankings, it's connections, etc...
There were a number of opinions about Wake Forest vs. Wake Forest MBA vs. Wake Forest Executive MBA, and if there should be a distinction between those programs and brands. There was discussion about how to create opportunities between the Winston-Salem programs and the Charlotte programs (Charlotte is a peer campus for MBA programs). And there was discussion about how we needed to look for more ways to network and explore with the students within our program.
My personal opinion is that it's a 30/70 split between the knowledge you learn, and the people/experiences you encounter. Don't get me wrong, what we read in the books/cases/articles are all very interesting and valuable, but when you compare that to the 400+ years of experience across 12-15 industries that exists in our classmates, I think that 30/70 breakdown is about right.
With more focus on case-method learning this semester, I think we're all able to learn more from each other's experience. I've made it one of my 2009 goals to really focus on learning from my classmates, and I hope that more people make that a priority for themselves too. In December, I think we'll all look back and find ourselves better for taking that approach.
I was a latch-key kid in elementary school. Not a big deal, both of my parents worked full-time and I learned very quickly how to take care of myself. Good life lesson. But when you start life like that, you tend to learn how to figure things out for yourself, and aren't inclined to ask others for help or advice. Needless to say, it's a trait that I've carried with me for most of my adult life.
One of the great things about MBA programs is that you're surrounded by people with very different backgrounds and experience. You also tend to interact with them in an environment where some non-work behaviors come out. Not to mention that you're with these people a lot. So after a while you realize that it might be a good idea to ask their opinion on something. What have you got to lose? Hopefully their experience will give you a unique angle on something.
Over the last 3-4 weeks, I've asked a few people for some feedback and the responses they gave me were refreshingly honest. Not only that, they phrased their responses in a way that completely opened my mind to new viewpoints which have been extremely helpful....one on how I interact with classmates, and another on how I might interact with my daughters.
So to those folks, I am extremely grateful....thank you!! Maybe this asking concept just might work. Maybe I need to update my goals to include asking a few more questions of my classmates.
While we don't specifically have a course called "How to be a better Leader" in the MBA program, there are frequent classroom and hallway discussions about how to be a better leader, or examples of great (or poor) leadership.
A number of us have been sharing tips about how we're managing and motivating our teams through these challenging times. I recently saw this article about Obama's Inaguation Speech and it does a very nice job of laying out a simple blueprint for highlighting the challenges and plotting the course when difficulty is ahead. I think it's a very useful model, and something I plan to use sometime soon.
I've written about my goals for the MBA program here and here, often focused on how I sometimes struggle to get these well defined.
Yesterday in class, I had a conversation with a classmate that I really respect. Smart guy, great leadership skills, confident and currently leading his company through some difficult changes. During the break, he made a comment about this blog and we started talking about hobbies, passions and ways that we'd leave our mark on this world. The conversation basically boiled down to a simple question, "How do you know what you should be doing, and are we doing enough?"
Successful career, good friends, good health, happy marriage and trying like crazy to raise children so they become good members of society. A lot of people would say that's something to be proud of. But that doesn't seem to be enough in the MBA mindset. Most of us are Type-A personalities and our natural inclination is to seek out more. More of something. But what is that something?
What I've observed is that people at our age seem to fall into three buckets.
Career Climbers - If they aren't running their own business already, they are laser focused on a title or a level. The job is their life, it's what gives them their sense of pride and worth. They are willing to make the major sacrifices to get to that desired level or title.
Manage the Bar on the Beach - Their end goal doesn't involve a corporation. They realize that they can make a healthy living and move towards that "after corporation" life by making some sacrifices now, to get that long-term goal. Their hobbies and personal lifestyle are building towards that next stage goal.
Where do I go next? - Smart, Successful, but 'tweeners in some category. They are completely capable of being that great leader, but they've made sacrifices/decisions (usually family) where they aren't willing to give up everything else for the big job. They have hobbies, typically activities with good friends, but they don't think of them as next-step-in-life activites.
The only answer I've been able to find for people in that third group (which is often me), is to experiment and try new things. Take a chance on failing. And once you learn a little bit, and find something enjoyable or interesting, see if you can combine it with another or your experiments.
For example, here's a couple things I'm interested in exploring:
I don't give back enough to charities, at least in terms of time (which I don't have much of with the MBA). As a father, I'm always looking for ways to teach my daughters lessons about life. And from a business perspective, I'm extremely interested in the alternative energy markets and technologies. So at some point in 2009, I'm going to explore charities that are involved in alternative energies. Maybe I'll find one where I can give of my time, involve my girls (or teach them something), and learn something that is business-useful for myself.
I've always loved to write, and I've been lucky enough to get some exposure to the publishing world. Just as I'm doing with this blog, I'd like the opportunity to write about things on a personal level. I'd love to write fiction, or children's stories. And if I could find a way to combine that with learning for my daughters (or other children), that would be a bonus. I've got 100s of thoughts, ideas and sound bytes collected in something I call "Letter's from Daddy", about things I've observed for my girls. Maybe someday I'll publish these.
I wish I had a better answer for my classmate, because I really enjoyed the conversation. I suspect that we'll continue it throughout 2009, and I hope we both can make some progress on finding that something.
We had several interesting discussions in class this weekend, but I'll go ahead and pick a discussion from our IT Mgm't course as the introductory "Discussion of the Week" topic. I actually learned more in the early discussions in the OpsMgm't and StratMktg courses, but I think this discussion had broader relevance to our overall MBA program.
The discussion centered around a snazzy Exponential Times video, looking at the pace at which our world is changing due to this technology they call "the Internet". Prior to watching the video, we were asked a simple question, "How do you see the trends of the last 10 years continuing (or failing)?" The responses ranged from Globalization to Big Box Retail to Greater Customization, alot of stuff that you read about in the press on a daily basis. All good answers, but then we watched the video.
As a group of (on average) 30-40yr old folks, the immediate response in the room was fairly quiet. When you're between the Boombers and GenY demographics in the US, and the mass of humanity in both India and China, it's an interesting place to be...to say the least.
As a group, we face several challenges and opportunities:
While we're technology literate, we're really the first generation to move through this as a learning curve, not as a part of our DNA (sorry Boomers....you're on the way out, so I'm not counting you anymore)
We've grown up in a world where companies followed the strategies and models defined in the 20th century. We learned and been trained in companies that sold locally and regionally, and that survived over many decades. Our MBA program is somewhat of a bridge between those 20th century models and scratching the surface on 21st century ideas.
Having lived on Internet time for the past 15 years, I felt comfortable (as much as anyone can be) with the explosiveness of the numbers in the video. I've lived with growth on that scale for a long time. What I need to get my head around is the idea that many of the current business models I know will be (or already are) obsolete. The good news is I have Fred, Seth and Umair to balance my work experience and MBA learnings.
The last couple of weeks have been very strange in terms of activity levels. MBA classes ended on Dec.6th, and don't resume until Jan.9th, so I'm able to shutoff my B-School brain for a little while. Throw in that my company has decided to shutdown from Christmas to New Year's, and this is about the longest stretch I've ever had of no school or no work. One of the things I've been doing lately is to create some 2009 plans and goals, both for school and work. With all the doom and gloom in the media these days, many people are worried that 2009 is going to be miserable, a 21st century depression. I'm taking a different outlook on 2009. I think it will be the beginning of huge opportunities for people willing to change the way they think about the world. It's a year of re-investment in yourself, in education, in new ideas and in new ways of thinking about difficult challenges.
These aren't minor tweaks I'm talking about here, so it helps to have a place to get away and think. If you don't already have that place, wherever it might be (coffee shop, in a library, yoga class, rock climbing, etc.), I highly suggest you find one. Mine is usually in the backyard (pictured above), overlooking the pond. I find a great set of music on the iPhone, and periodically use QuickVoice to keep track of ideas. Today was a great example. Leaves from about 15 trees still needed to be raked and the kids were off with mom at the mall, which meant 2hrs of uninterrupted quiet time for me. The combination of fresh air, some moderately hard work and nature are a great way to refresh your mind or think clearly.
btw - One of things I thought about today was sort of a combination of two things: (1) an upcoming Strategic Marketing class, and (2) the 300,000 applicants for 3,300 roles in the Obama administration. With the odds of success at no better than 1%, how would I go about creating a way to get myself noticed in less than 1 minute (probably less) as the applications are reviewed? Thinking about this led me to think about all the noise we deal with on a daily basis and how any of us can get ourselves or our products/services noticed in today's world. Needless to say, it generated a number of ideas that I need to explore further in 2009.
As I mentioned in my post yesterday, one of the great challenges in life is accepting that you won't get your predictions about the future correct, so you need to be flexible in your planning. It's exactly the reason most of us go back and get our MBA. An MBA provides flexibility by exposing us to breadth and depth of business knowledge, often filling in existing gaps and further strengthening existing strengths. But the B-School model of groups and teams, creates two interesting dilemmas:
1) If you only focus on your strengths during group projects, then you deny other people on your team the opportunity to expand their skills, and conversely you will suffer in areas of weakness on other projects. 2) Because of the variety of coursework within an MBA program, there typically isn't enough time to explore the depth of a single area that you may desire.
Faced with our current work culture, and the sad lie of mediocrity, how can anyone justify an MBA program if their goal is to reach higher levels in their organization?
I think the answer lies in an expanded way of thinking about goals and outputs from an MBA program. If you look at it strictly for grades, you'll most likely not retain the knowledge long past graduation. If you focus narrowly on a specific subject, then you have to question why you didn't just take some specialized coursework. But if you realize that the value in the program comes from much more than the coursework, and you deeply explore relationships, experience and critical thinking with classmates and professors, then I believe you'll come to the conclusion that great leaders overcome any areas of mediocrity by not only surrounding themselves with great individuals (who you need to identify, recruit & retain), but by being great in all the areas that exist between the subjects and relationships. An MBA program gives you the breadth and time to explore how to be great in those areas, and to me, that may just be the most important element of any MBA program.
To this point, I haven't really talked about the program in detail. So let me cover a few basic questions that I get asked all the time.
What is the structure of the program?
The program is 17 months long, and the Class of 2009 runs from August 2008 until December 2009. The group meets every other weekend, Friday and Saturday, in Winston-Salem on the campus of WFU, in the Babcock Graduate Management building. We have two courses each day when we're on campus. Three times during the program, we meet for extended periods. The first is the Orientation Week in mid-August. The next is a two week international trip, with the options of visiting Japan, China, India or South America (Brazil/Argentina/Chile). The final week of the winter 2009 semester is a practicum project which ties together many aspects of the entire program. Because the program is condensed to 17 months, it is not only a huge time commitment from the students, but also for the sponsoring companies. The entire program requires students to be on campus ~45-50 days, so we're very appreciative of the support our companies provide us to participate in this outstanding program.
What type of people are in the program?
In a couple words..."an interesting mix". I don't have exact details about demographics or scores, but let me share some tidbits about the diversity and backgrounds of the group.
There are 31 people in the class.
The majority of the class are married, with about 50% having children.
They come from as close as Winston-Salem, and as far away as Charlotte, Raleigh, Roanoke, Hickory, Asheville and Charleston, WV.
About 20% of the class are Senior Executives, or run their own businesses.
About 25% of the class have worked &/or lived abroad and speak at least 2 languages fluently (besides English)
The following markets are represented in the class: (Green) Architecture, Automotive, Banking, Computer Engineering, Consulting, Education, Healthcare, IT, Telecommunications, and Textiles.
Beyond traditional manager roles, the class includes existing or former Doctors, Police Officers, Fire Fighters, Science Teachers, MTV Producers, Kick-Boxing Instructors, Black Panther protestors, Race Car owners, Punk Rock Guitarists, Authors, Porn Mustache wearers, and Military Brats.
How do you manage work and school?
The keys to surviving an MBA program, and "survival" is the optimal description, are prioritization and sacrifice. If you're like most people in the class, you were already working 50-60hrs weeks (or more), and managing a certain amount of work travel. Now throw in the alternating weekends in the program, and roughly 20-25hrs a week doing reading, papers and preparing for the next weekend. So something has to give, and it usually falls into one of a couple of categories:
Hobbies - These are the easiest and hardest to give up. In my case, my golf clubs have literally been put in the attic. Matt Kirk and I have sworn that we'll get in a game in the Spring/Summer, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed. But otherwise, they are collecting dust.
Exercise - Prior to the program, I was an avid runner, typically getting up at 5:30am and putting in 25-30 miles a week. I was down around 167lbs. When you're up studying almost every night until 12:30-1am, it gets much tougher to get up at 5:30am on a regular basis. So like many 18yr old undergrads, I've developed the dreaded "Freshman 15" (actually 13). Getting this back on track and consistent is moving to the top of my list for 2009. 11:30pm is now going to be my cutoff each night.
Family Time - This probably belongs at the top of the list, because an MBA program is very difficult on the family. Probably more so than the student. The irony is that for most people in the class, they are in the program because they want to provide better opportunities for their family. While the sacrifice here is difficult, it is short-term. I've found that the key here is communication (over-communication) and dedicated time. I never touch the books on off-weekends and Sundays. That's time for the family. And I try and find ways to stay connected to my beautiful little girls, through phone calls or video. We use Skype to talk live, and I try and create them a short video every weekend:
Work - This probably isn't a good thing to ignore or de-prioritize, especially in today's economy. If anything, the program's demands are an excellent opportunity to see how well you can better learn to delegate, as well as hone your communications to your teams.
What's the biggest challenge in the transition back to school?
Panic. There are many outstanding people in my class. People that have been successful in every aspect of their life. But the pace of this program, and the variety of new topics has exposed me to a number of people who are experiencing Panic for the first time in their lives. It's been really interesting to watch people struggle with new concepts, and potentially face failure. I suspect this is a huge learning experience for them....both good and bad. The good news is that our groups have really bonded together and people are very helpful in getting others through these times. Sometimes this is just a reassurance that they aren't the only one struggling to learn something. Sometimes it's taking extra time to help them work through homework problems. Sometimes it's being available on the other end of a phone call to listen to their challenges. And sometimes it's having to be blunt with them that they need to step up their work and raise the level of their game. I suspect that while people may worry about grades now, by next December they will just be glad to have the MBA title on their resume and will look back at the relationships as being much more important that a B+ or A- in Quant. I know I will.
What are you going to do with your MBA once the program is over?
That's the $64,000 question, isn't it? The knee-jerk answer is to file for a Federal Funds Bailout for my tuition bills, but that line may be fairly long:) The real answer is that I look at this program as part of the process, and not the answer. I went into this program knowing that I had a number of skills that I needed to improve, and several areas of knowledge that I needed to expand. I'm confident that I'll leave the program improved in both of those areas. But as far as a specific job or project I'm hoping to obtain, that's not on my list of goals. It may be for some of my classmates, but not me. One thing that I do plan to do as part of this program is to expand my international exposure. I'm planning to attend the two-week trip to China in May 2009, and will be working to learn at least a moderate amount of Chinese/Mandarin prior to the trip. I have a Chinese woman on my work team that has offered to tutor me, so maybe by May we'll be able to conduct our 1:1 meetings in Mandarin...at least a little bit.
The weeks leading up to an MBA program are a mix of excitement, anxiety, list making and change preparation. It's a little bit like being a first time parent, when several of your friends have already had kids and you've only visited a few times. You have some sense of what's coming, but until you actually live with it 24x7, for several months, you really don't know what you're getting into. My brother had just recently completed the Evening MBA at UNC, so I thought I had some idea...nope...uh uh...don't kid yourself. It's going to be a lot more work than I expected, and it's going to require a lot more emotional commitment that I planned for.
A few weeks before the program starts, a FedEx truck shows up at the house with a large box. A very large, heavy box of books and handouts for the semester. At first you think they might have mistaken your house for an IRS Audit warehouse, but no such luck. This is your reading for the next 4.5 months. Somewhere in a dense forest, trees are crying:) This is your first sign that the workload is going to be significant.
The course list for the first semester is as follows:
The first thing I did was look at the required reading for the first couple classes, and divide it by the number of days before the Orientation Week. That turned out to be Mistake #1. As if I hadn't learned my lesson 18yrs ago as an undergrad, I severely under-estimated the learning curve for new topics. This wasn't going to be like ready work reports, where I had years of background to draw from, this was all going to be new. And I needed to approach it in a different manner. Needless to say, I was behind from Day 1 in class :( Luckily for me, and I suspect many of my classmates, the first week in class was primarily focused on team building and self-assessment activities.
The team building activities were so good, in my opinion, that they really should be used as a blueprint for any leader that is starting a new team. While it seems somewhat tedious at times, looking back on it now, it did really built the foundation for our team (Team 5) and lead to our success. I'm going to devote an entire post to those activities, so I'll skip any more details for now.
As I began investigating MBA programs, I knew that my search wouldn't be easy because I had a number of challenges I would need to align between my lifestyle (personal & work) and the potential programs. My list looked something like this:
The program needed to have an excellent reputation. Lucikly, living in Raleigh, NC, I'm close proximity to a number of world-class programs (Duke, UNC, WFU, UVA).
The program needed to meet face-to-face on a regular basis, and attract a broad background of students. I knew that making new contacts was as important as what I'd learn in the classroom.
The program needed to have flexibility of schedule. I travel quite a bit for business, so a full-time or weeknight program wasn't going to be possible. I need a program that met weekends, in some variation.
Duration and starting time of the program was important, because of the sacrifice my family was making for me. I wanted to be done before my kids were in school or actively participating in sports.
Cost is always a factor, especially when the cost of today's MBA programs could pay off your mortgage or put your kids through school (assuming you could put it in a 529 today).
Beyond those four schools, I looked at the weekend/executive programs at Kellogg, Ross, Wharton, and Harvard. These are all tremendous programs, but the travel requirements were too much for me at this time.
As I narrowed it down to the four local programs, I really spent a lot of time weighing the pros and cons of each program. What was the length of the program and when did they meet? What classes were offered? How were the classes taught and how much was individual vs. team-based?
My final decision came down to several criteria:
The case method taught at Harvard was constantly emulated or used by other programs, so I was very interested in a program that used this method. This included both UVA and WFU.
The program needed to have an international component, but this couldn't be the primary focus of the program. This ruled out the Duke OneMBA program.
The program needed to have a broad variety of classes, as I was looking to add breadth and depth to my skill set. All of the programs had excellent curriculums, so this was somewhat of a wash.
Travel to the program should be reasonable. This ruled out the UNC Executive Program, which met in WashDC. UVA also was going to be difficult as it was about a 4-5hr drive from Raleigh.
The costs should be reasonably. UNC and WFU were both below $80k, and then there was a huge jump above $100k for both UVA and Duke. I know that we're talking about an ROI that extends over a lifetime, but $30-50k is a good chunk of change when you're raising two kids and still paying a mortgage.
So at the end of the day, when I weighed all the pros and cons, I narrowed my choice to WFU Weekend Exec and UNC Weekend Exec. UNC was ranked higher, but WFU was 6 months shorter and started in August, 2008 rather than January, 2009. Throw in the case-study method, the excellent curriculum and the previous WFU experience/bias and I decided that another tour at WFU was the right decision for me.
At age 36, with two young kids (3yrs and 2yrs) already consuming all my free time, I finally decided to go back and get my MBA. Seems like a strange point in life for someone to make that decision, but there is some rhyme and reason to it, and a lot of history. First, let me explain some of the history.
I can remember all the way back in 5th grade thinking that I was going to get good grades in school, go to University of Michigan, and then get my MBA. It was a perfect fit for a Type-A, focused young kid. And growing up outside of Detroit, surrounded by neighborhoods full of white-collar automotive managers, that was the mindset I had all around me. Somewhere along the way, that path didn't exactly work out as smoothly as I had envisioned.
Instead of U of Mich, I headed south to Wake Forest for warmer weather, a great school and a chance to play college baseball. After four years, I was pretty sick of being in school, but just before graduation I took the GMAT just in case I decided to go back in a couple years.
A couple years into the real world, after some college friends went back for their MBAs, I looked into several programs. But after looking at the "graduate salaries and jobs" listings, I convinced myself that I was already there in most cases and couldn't afford to stop working for 2 years.
After the Internet Bubble burst in 2001, I looked at several programs again. After seven years, maybe it was time to look at something other than technology, and an MBA might just help me find that new path. But once again, the timing just didn't work out to make the sacrifice of time and money.
In the fall of 2007, I was invited to be part of an Executive Leadership program at Cisco Systems (my employer at the time). The program was designed to identify 50-60 high potential Directors/Sr.Directors within the company, and give them a 3-4 month project targeting a $1B/yr new market opportunity. I was invited to assist one of the project teams as a technology Subject Matter Expert (SME), but was allowed to be part of every aspect of the program and have direct access to Senior Leadership. Not only was it a tremendous opportunity to impact the company, but it gave me a completely different perspective on the breadth and depth of thinking that occurs at that level. When the program ended, I knew that I needed to make the sacrifices needed to get myself into an MBA program as soon as possible if I ever wanted to have the skills to succeed at that level.
Now the biggest challenge was going to be convincing my wife that we could make this sacrifice together, because it was going to take a complete commitment from my family to make this work. Not only would it require huge commitment and sacrifice from me, but it was going to mean a difficult two years for her and our girls.
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