The Kellogg School of Business
Oh Business School. No I don’t have an MBA... But I just had the fortune of spending the last week at the Kellogg School of Business taking an intense crash course – think 1 semester of business school in 6 days. And you wonder why I’m tired right now? But the point here is, that even though I have had no desire to spend 2 years getting an MBA this course was VALUABLE. I found it quite amazing the amount of academic rigor that has been put into the discipline of marketing. I was also surprised at how many folks at Microsoft don’t know all that much about it – or at least don’t put that much of it into practice. So now I am a smarter person. I understand and know a lot more than I started. But I am still forced to reach back to my age old dilemma with education – what do I do? Now that I’m not in the silver lined walls of academia, how do I make these models and rigor apply in the real world? Where is the time to make it happen? Who has the resources? What is the cost and how can I justify it? Those are the things they don’t teach us. Not because they aren’t smart enough – Dipak Jain is one of the smartest people I have ever met. Leigh Thompson was probably the most engaging educator that I have ever had the pleasure of working with. They all know the difficulties, but none of them can answer these questions. And so I travel home, my brain hurting from all the learning and struggling to know what to do next. Oh well … I’ll probably just do what I’ve been doing, but maybe my mental models will “updated” and I’ll make better decisions. Translation – maybe I’ll have a new perspective on problems that will improve my results….