A little about a lot
Perspective gained
Fall semester, 2010 has just begun. There’s a chill in the air, accompanied by a sense of optimism and excitement at the upcoming school year. Lots of people beginning what will likely be a multi-year journey toward an academic degree, which at the onset can seem daunting. For me though, I’ve been at UNR long enough to feel very comfortable with school starting again. Only two semesters now from graduating, and I’m finally getting a greater sense of just what my MBA program has and will have provided by the time I graduate in May of 2011.
Broad Brush
I didn’t specialize within the program (i.e. finance, gaming, etc), but I’m not sure a “specialization” would have changed things much. Essentially, our MBA program seems designed as a broad-brush program with the goal of producing knowledgeable managers who can lead organizations (or units within an organization) to produce the most of, well, whatever it is they produce.
I think this broad-brush approach is one of the main things that I’ve come to value in both school and life recently. In the business world, I’ve realized that while specific technical knowledge within an industry is extremely important (both in one’s day to day work and to earn the respect of one’s subordinates), it takes a concerted mental effort (like going to graduate school) to pull oneself out of one’s daily routine and look at an organization from a structural and personnel perspective. In short, Michael Gerber’s “Work on your business, rather than in your business.” Yet so many organizations are stuck in their habits, lacking the initiative to make the changes required to become more efficient and more effective.
Why stepping back is the only way to step forward
Those two words, effectiveness and efficiency, are used around here often, probably so often that they’ve lost some of their luster. But they really encompass what great companies do. Great companies are effective – they serve the customer’s needs by providing a quality product or service. In a capitalist society, there aren’t many other ways to succeed without making the customers happy (thankfully). And they are efficient – they use the fewest resources required to satisfy the customer’s need – which means they are able to strike the balance between required profit and a reasonable sale price. To be consistently efficient and effective, a companies needs leaders who are looking at processes – of production and of communication. An MBA teaches you to look at processes, and for that alone it’s valuable.
The benefits of knowing how to do a lot
Just as having the ability to take a wide-angle perspective is important, so is having the ability to actually do a wide range of things. I think of Clint Eastwood’s line in Gran Torino, “I fix things” and I think of my father. Both men look at obstacles in life as things that, with a little learning and some effort, can be fixed by the layman. I, for example, painted my house this summer. I’d never really done interior painting before, but I learned and did it. Now I know how long it takes, what it’s worth to me, and I would have the ability to make a much more informed decision the next time I have to choose to do it myself or pay someone else. Obviously, there are times when specialization is integral to a company’s efficiency, and the “build it or buy it” decision is extremely important. But in general, people seem hesitant to learn and do a multitude of things that are really quite simple and, apart from saving you money by doing it yourself, help give you a much broader understanding of how the world works. Don’t be afraid to learn a little about a lot of different things – life is rarely consistent. Good leaders know that.
