First Week of the MBA Program
Friday, February 27th, 2009
Lindy insists my holiday was a year long, not just the Christmas break, so it could explain that feeling I had this week of hitting the MBA (Master of Business Administration) program running. Something akin to using your own feet in a Flintstonesque Ultra-Lite take-off from a major airport. Loud, busy and although this afternoon I’m in private space there is the echo of a control tower screaming away in my head. Wash, rinse and repeat.
Luckily I’d done a good portion of my pre-reading for the subjects over the last three weeks but still it feels a little like every room I entered filled my to-do list to completion. Then onto the next, filled again. And so forth. My subjects include economics, financial decision making, law and marketing – an interesting mix.
So what have I learned in week 1 of an MBA that is new knowledge. Economics is a social science. Financial decision making is something I’m ill-prepared for at this stage. Law is an old friend who will continue to cause me to lose sleep. And, finally, direct competition is the worst business position to be in so avoid it. Sometimes we sit in these lectures and workshops wondering what the hell qualifies us for even having that conversation? Sometimes the amount of mental work expected at the beginning of a unit can make you wonder how any super-human effort is even going to dent that workload. Especially at the post-graduate level where assignments seem to be about double the volume and quality of undergraduate unit workloads.
In the end though this is the journey. It’s not an easy one and I’ll spend a lot of time not blogging about web design and not reading articles about the things that I should be reading to stay up to date with technical and industry contemporary practice. Some days I’ll just shut my eyes and lay on the office floor curled up in a little ball and maybe once or twice this year I’ll even cry and say it’s too bloody hard, there’s too bloody much of it.
But I’ll pick myself up every time and plod forward with the ambitious goal of climbing the MBA everest. Why? Really why? Because someday I’ll get to carry that MBA into a boardroom and talk about my work in their terms. Period. Up until now we’ve been having two entirely different conversations about the same thing.
