MBA Year One Reflections
Coming up on a year since my graduation from Xavier with an MBA, here’s some takeaways:
It doesn’t look like I expected. I thought I’d be using what I’ve learned as a business co-owner, board member, and MBA grad to do ROI analysis or run sophisticated NPV spreadsheets internally and for clients, but that doesn’t generally happen for two reasons:
- first, many companies lack the instrumentation needed to know what their expected capital outlays, revenue and operating costs projections over time, and expected rates of return are/should be for any given project. This is a challenging thing to have operationally available consistently for fact-based planning.
- secondly when a company does know how to do that it’s often considered a loss of leverage to share that with an outside partner who could theoretically use that to negotiate different rates. I wish I was able to use that finance skill more to help drive decisions with financial and technical data, but pragmatically I understand that the vast majority of business decisions are made just like every other one - by instinct, feel, and experience.
I use the operations and strategy planning knowledge almost constantly – it helps me to see things from other peoples’ perspectives, to find better win-win situations, and to fit my daily actions into a bigger picture that’s headed in a good direction for me, my company, and our clients. I am a better engineer and leader because of these tools I have to see and paint the bigger picture.
The values based leadership concentration has helped me to look at organizations from the top-down and understand the impact and influence that boards and executives have on setting not only the overall strategy of a company but also the ethical and operational posture in which the organization executes on that vision.
I’m still blown away at the difference some maturity and experience had on my ability to be a good student. I was an average engineering undergrad but an exceptional student of business, in part because I valued what I was learning intentionally, I was applying it as I went, and I was paying for it out of pocket (big motivator!).
With a year under my belt, I can continue to recommend Xavier University and the Williams College of Business MBA programs.