MBA-A-Day: Final Thoughts

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading MBA-A-Day, and more importantly, I hope you’ve learned something.

I would leave you with 3 final thoughts:

• If you want good results, you absolutely have to do the work. That means making the spreadsheet, writing down your assumptions, computing the outcomes of various scenarios, doing a project plan, and practicing your elevator pitch. Nothing worth doing is easy, and getting lucky only takes you so far. Make a plan, do the work, succeed or fail, learn from it, rinse and repeat.
• Understand the rules. Businesses make decisions that may seem callous because their primary obligation is to increase value for their shareholders. That’s a rule. Companies may have crazy valuations based on future earnings potential, not based on paying back the money they’ve already spent. Sunk costs is a rule. If you want to change business, you have to understand–and play by–those rules.
• People are messy. Nothing is as clean or simple as it probably should be, and those all-important rules get broken all the time. It’s amazing that the world functions at all. But it does. Just remember to leave a little leeway to account for the unexpected, dumb, and irrational.

Finally, the knowledge presented in the previous essays is the result of weeks of preparation on the behalf of the various professors who taught me throughout my evenings at BU. While the interpretation is my own, the source material is theirs, and I remain indebted to them all. They are:

• Accounting – Ray Wilson
• Organizational Behavior – Mark Landers
• Corporate Finance – Jack Aber
• Marketing – Patrick Kaufmann
• Leadership – Scott Taylor
• Economics – Michael Salinger
• Data Analysis – Jay Zagorsky
• Operations Management – Janelle Heineke
• Six Sigma- Janelle Heineke
• IT Strategy – Paul Carlile
• Project Management – Stephen Rosenthal
• Strategy – Samina Karim
• Financial Statement Analysis – Liz Keating
• Managing Career Growth – Julia Geisman
• Entrepreneurship – Vinit Nijhawan
• Starting New Ventures – Pete Russo
• Negotations – Emily Heaphy
• Business Law – Amy Scott
• Entrepreneurial Finance – Rana Gupta

Thanks for reading!