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….