Over the Christmas break was the first time I stepped out of the business school ecosystem since starting and returned to familiar, pre-MBA places. I somehow forgot I’m an MBA. But as I moved about the world in my time off, I kept having business-related insights, blowing my own mind at these wildly out-of-character, oracle-like observations. Until, of course, I’d remember I hadn’t ascended to some higher plane of knowledge but was just utilizing information I’d been recently taught at the program I forgot I attended.
This temporary forgetfulness allowed me to cosplay as a harried-but-brilliant corporate executive whose business shrewdness knows no bounds — not even relevant experience.
Let me demonstrate with a few examples.
- Newfound and Untested but Definitely Infallible Business Acumen: I was catching up on the phone with a friend (let’s call her Sammy) when she told me about the massive success our friend from college (let’s call her Tammy) was having with her new store. In fact, Tammy was considering expanding the store after only a few months of being open. The business savant in me immediately clenched up in anxiety at this brash move as at least seven different equations from the Business Finance Equation Sheet we were given during exams flashed through my mind in quick succession.
But just as I was about to tell Sammy to give Tammy my new number, I stopped myself. “Sometimes,” the wise financier inside me said, “lessons are best learned through experience.”
NPV, IRR, Compounding, Variance, Options, and a few other equally relevant equations I could definitely name if pressed, filled my head. I felt like a weary veteran witnessing the bold, untried naivete of a new recruit. How could Tammy think of expanding her store without consulting an expert like me, someone with a proven track record of taking one Business Finance exam (grade and passing status pending for two more months)? But just as I was about to tell Sammy to give Tammy my new number, I stopped myself. “Sometimes,” the wise financier inside me said, “lessons are best learned through experience.” So, while Tammy might be a second-time, successful business-owner, I should let her try (and maybe fail) on her own, instead of giving unsolicited help. She won’t always be able to lean on her friend/business-leader-of-tomorrow whose own venture didn’t survive to its first tax season.
- The Dearth of Poka-yoke in International Train Travel: Standing in line to catch the Eurostar from Paris to London, I stared, wordless and appalled, at the line management. Or rather, lack thereof. But I wasn’t appalled in the vaguely informed but fiercely opinionated way of a civilian with no Technology and Operations Management expertise. You know, the way we’ve all done, where you bemoan zippering when it’s ahead of you but lament people who don’t zipper properly when it’s behind you. Nor am I talking about how suddenly, when you’re in a feral line where you’re being jostled and passed, you recall with impotent rage all the injustices you’ve suffered — from the third-grade bully who stole your juice box to the analyst who took lunch breaks and still got promoted ahead of you — and how this line is just one more example of how life has done you in.
No, I’m talking about the horror you feel when, as a professional, you see that the snaking line created by fabric divider belts on wobbly stands are not absolute lines. In fact, there are not one, not two, but three gaps in the dividers where customers from three other lines are intentionally supposed to file in with no system to do so in place. Not even zippering! Just a mass of bodies all pushing on toward the golden gates of freedom (passport-checking machines). This system does not have failure designed out as per Poka-yoke, one of the principles of the Lean System that Toyota favors. Here, if anything, failure is designed into the system. And as I watch, I hear a voice in my head, an ancient and wise one, telling me that to make up for this failure, the good people of Eurostar will have to offer me two moments of delight to reset me to neutral per my professor’s teachings.
- The Muse Who Whispers in My Ear And Tells Me If It’s Earned, Owned, or Paid Media: Non-MBAs might take a drive to Wales and focus on something silly and ephemeral like landscapes. But MBAs (whether they remember they are one or not) will look at passing billboard advertisements and under their breath mutter to no one but the marketing gods who are listening, “Paid media.” And should outrageous celebrity scandals come up in conversation, we MBAs will inevitably joke about the extra attention the celebrities had garnered as a result of these scandals. And then we’ll share a meaningful look that tells us we’re members of the same marketing insider club as we say to each other, sotto voce, “Earned media.” And, when we see a garage with a funny name, and then see that same name on a car decal, we won’t say anything, but we’ll all be thinking the same thing. “Owned media.”
What’s most impressive, though, is that given I have no background in any of these disciplines, I do not feel unequal to the pseudo-careers and knowledge I’ve been unintentionally pretending to have. Which means that while I was learning facts, the MBA was teaching me the most important lesson of all. The businesswoman was never someone I had to become; she was always inside me, unjustifiably confident and ready to emerge.
